3.0../^ 


^  PRINCETON,  N.  J.  ^fi^ 


Presented    byT?-o-\,  \Af .^B.  (3vns,fi.ne- ,  T3.3D 

BR  115  .S6  W3  1915 

Ward,  Harry  Frederick,  1873- 

1966. 
Social  evangelism 


LIBRARY 

OF  CHRISTIAN  PROGRESS 


Volumes  Issued 

The  Church  a  Community  Force.      By  Worth  M.   Tippy 
The  Church  at  the  Center.      By  fFarrfn  H.  Wilson 
The  Making  of  a  Country  Parish.      By   Harlow  S.  Mills 
Working  Women  of  Japan.      By  Sidney  L.   Gulick 
Social  Evangelism.      By  Harry  F.   Ward 


Cloth,  50  Cents,  Prepaid 


ADDITIONAL  VOLUMES  TO  BE  ISSUED 


SOCIAL 
EVANGELISM 


BY 


HARRY  F.  WARD 


V 


^^H,. 


NEW  YORK 

Missionary  Education  Movement  of  the 

United  States  and  Canada 

1915 


COPYRIGHT,  191S,  BY 

MISSIONARY  EDUCATION  MOVEMENT  OF  THE 

UNITED  STATES  AND  CANADA 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I     What  Is  Social  Evangelism?     .        i 

II     The    Imperative    for    a    Social 

Evangel   .         .         .         .         '     '^S 

III     The  Place  of  the  Individual    .     45 

IV     New  Times,  New  Methods  .     6^ 

V     The  Nature  and  Content  of  the 

Message   .  .         .  .         -91 

VI     What  About  the  Results?  .   131 


WHAT  IS  SOCIAL  EVANGELISM? 

THE  social  movement  of  our  time  is 
deeply  influencing  the  life  of  the 
Church.  Every  department  of  religious 
activity  gives  evidence  of  being  touched  by 
it.  It  is  in  the  field  of  evangelism  that  its  trail 
is  faintest.  Here  its  main  work  is  yet  to  be 
done. 

The  activities  and  propaganda  which  have 
recently  been  organized  in  the  churches  under 
the  head  of  ^'Social  Service"  are  often  con- 
trasted with  the  evangelistic  function  of  the 
Church  as  though  they  were  inherently  an- 
tagonistic or  mutually  exclusive.  This  is 
largely  because  the  terms  social  service  and 
evangelism  are  both  overworked.  One  has 
long  been  and  the  other  is  fast  becoming  a 

[I] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


house  of  refuge  for  the  crowd  that  cry  "Lord, 
Lord,  but  do  not  the  things  that  I  say."  The 
shibboleth  is  shouted  but  the  deed  remains 
undone,  the  fact  unaccomplished.  The  crowd 
prefers  the  easy  enthusiasm  of  the  bleachers 
to  the  stern  struggle  of  the  field,  would  rather 
cheer  the  embarking  regiment  than  seek  the 
enlisting  office.  When  the  Church  actually 
labors  at  the  tasks  of  evangelism  and  social 
service,  they  are  found  to  be  interdependent. 
Social  service  is  found  to  have  definite 
evangelistic  values,  and  evangelism  to  have 
genuine  social  worth.  In  fact,  a  social 
evangelism  appears. 

The  social  service  movement  is  far  from 
being  the  superficial  propaganda  described  by 
its  superficial  critics.  It  does  not  propose  to 
make  the  Church  a  mere  agent  for  social 
reform.  Its  purpose  is  the  regeneration  of  the 
social  order,  and  it  promotes  reforms  only  as 
they  are  the  working  out  of  social  salvation. 
It  has  never  sought  to  substitute  a  "soup  and 

[2] 


WHAT  IT  IS 


soap  salvation"  for  ^^spiritual  regeneration," 
but  it  does  believe  that  regeneration  must 
affect  the  whole  of  life.  Its  chief  concern  is 
not  with  externalities  but  with  getting  the  very 
dynamic  of  God  into  all  human  movements. 

When  the  regenerative  purpose  and  power 
of  the  social  service  movement  is  recognized, 
social  service  and  evangelism  are  seen  to  have 
a  relationship  even  closer  than  that  of  parallel 
agencies  of  the  Kingdom.  One  is  the  insepa- 
rable complement  of  the  other.  The  social 
awakening  in  the  Church  is  the  culmination 
of  evangelical  Christianity,  which  replaced 
a  formal  intellectualism  that  had  neither 
spiritual  power  nor  ethical  results.  It  is  the 
completion  of  the  movement  to  vitalize 
Christianity,  which  could  not  be  contained  in 
feeling  any  more  than  in  creeds.  A  scientific 
world,  taught  to  know  reality,  demands  of 
religion  ethical  results.  This  puts  an  addi- 
tional task  upon  evangelism.  It  must  secure 
the  realization  of  God  in  the  outer  as  well  as 

[3] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


the  inner  life,  it  must  obtain  the  "witness  of 
the  Spirit'^  in  the  contacts  of  the  Christian 
with  his  fellows.  This  is  precisely  the  purpose 
of  the  social  movement  in  the  churches.  This 
is  also  the  test  of  its  worth;  and  the  future  of 
our  faith  depends  upon  the  ability  to  meet  this 
test.  If  social  Christianity  cannot  put  more  of 
God  into  human  life  than  has  been  realized 
by  the  purely  individualistic,  emotional  type, 
then  our  religion  has  no  triumphant  place  in 
the  ongoing  of  the  race. 

Evangelism — that  almost  threadbare  term 
— has  come  to  mean  something  more  than  the 
aggressive  promulgation  of  the  gospel.  Ifi  its 
recent  manifestations  it  has  come  to  mean  the 
aggressive  attempt  to  secure  individual  ad- 
herents to  organized  Christianity.  To  confine 
its  objective  to  individuals  alone  is  a  grievous 
limitation  of  the  purpose  and  function,  the 
power  and  the  goal  of  our  faith.  To  attempt 
to  develop  an  evangelism  which  should  seek 
the  community  life  for  Christianity  but  should 

[4] 


WHAT  IT  IS 


ignore    individuals    would    be    an    error    of 
equally  grave  importance. 

To  insist  upon  the  necessity  for  a  social 
evangelism  is  not  to  contrast  an  evangelism 
that  is  social  in  its  purpose  with  one  that  is 
individual  in  its  objective.  Indeed,  such  a 
contrast  cannot  properly  be  made,  for  an 
evangelism  that  is  true  to  its  gospel  must  be 
both  individual  and  social.  Says  the  General 
Conference  of  the  Methodist  Episcopal 
Church :  ^'In  the  social  crisis  now  confronting 
Christianity  the  urgent  need  and  duty  of  the 
Church  is  to  develop  an  evangelism  which 
will  recognize  the  possibility  and  the  imper- 
ative necessity  of  accomplishing  the  regenera- 
tion of  communities  as  well  as  persons,  whose 
goal  shall  be  the  perfection  both  of  society  and 
of  the  individual.''  The  more  thoroughly 
evangelism  comprehends  the  dual  nature  of 
its  task  the  more  effective  will  be  its  work. 
The  clearer  it  sees  its  relation  to  the  social 
order,  the  stronger  will  be  its  appeal  to  the 

[5] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


modern  imlividual.  The  more  it  understands 
the  individual  and  comes  in  comprehend  his 
social  nature,  the  stronger  will  be  its  grip  upon 
the  community  life. 

The  development  (^f  the  social  values  in 
evangelism  and  of  the  evangelistic  values  in 
social  service  is  one  of  the  signs  of  the  times. 
It  forecasts  the  consequent  amalgamation  in 
a  common  effort  of  forces  that  have  hereto- 
fore been  working  separately.  The  mightv 
evangelism  of  the  middle  of  the  last  century 
created  as  one  of  its  by-products  the  moral 
standards  of  the  formative  community  life  of 
the  Middle  West.  It  turned  licentious, 
drunken,  brawling  people  into  folks  who  be- 
gan to  organize  their  communities  on  the  basis 
of  purity,  temperance,  and  a  decent  respect 
for  the  rights  and  opinions  of  others.  The 
evangelism  of  to-day,  even  in  the  hands  of  its 
most  individualistic  exponents,  attempts  to 
exert  a  direct  influence  upon  the  community 
life.     It  brings  its  batteries  to  bear  upon  cor- 

[6] 


WHAT  IT  IS 


rupt  government,  the  liquor  traffic,  the  social 
evil.  Here  is  an  attempt  to  bring  within  the 
scope  of  the  evangel  the  fundamental  social 
relationships  of  sex  and  property.  The  most 
easily  recognized  perversions  of  these  rela- 
tionships are  vigorously  attacked  even  though 
their  subtler  abuses  pass  unrecognized  and 
their  constructive  ct^ntrol  for  the  development 
of  the  Christian  social  order  goes  untaught. 
It  is  imperfect  testimony,  but  still  evidence  of 
the  fact  that  evangelism  is  necessarily  social 
in  its  nature  and  results. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  evangelistic  values 
in  the  social  service  movement  become  in- 
creasingly apparent.  This  must  needs  be,  for 
this  movement  is  one  of  the  developments  of 
the  great  missionary  impulse  of  the  last  cen- 
tury. It  grew  out  of  the  passion  to  serve  the 
neglected  lives  of  our  city  slums  which  was 
forced,  for  the  very  satisfaction  of  its  desire 
to  save  men,  to  develop  an  equal  passion  to 
save  the  social  order  in  which  men  must  live. 

[7] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


Small  wonder  then  that  the  social  passion 
kindles  the  fading  fires  of  a  personal  faith  in 
the  lives  of  men  in  both  the  group  of  intellect 
and  the  group  of  toil,  who  have  turned  away 
from  the  Church  because  it  gave  scant  encour- 
agement to  their  great  enthusiasm  for  human- 
ity, to  their  devotion  to  community  welfare. 
Said  the  leading  educator  of  a  community  to 
the  social  service  speaker:  ^'I  have  cut  out  the 
church  for  several  years,  but  if  it  is  going  to 
do  vital  community  service,  count  me  in.'^  A 
social  service  meeting  in  another  town  was 
amazed  to  hear  the  leading  socialist  critic  of 
the  churches  declare:  '^If  you  churchmen 
really  mean  to  take  up  this  program,  I'll  go 
with  you  to  the  end  of  the  road." 

There  are  sections  of  our  cosmopolitan  pop- 
ulation who  have  never  heard  the  gospel  of 
Jesus  in  its  original  simplicity,  to  whom  its 
social  interpretation  and  application  is  the 
easiest  and  sometimes  the  only  approach.  The 
Jews  offer  an  impervious  front  to  conventional 

[8] 


WHAT  IT  IS 


evangelism.  Yet  the  younger  Jews,  partic- 
ularly of  the  Slavic  group,  are  true  to  their 
prophetic  ancestry  in  their  social  passion. 
They  respond  eagerly  to  the  social  teachings 
of  Jesus  and  there  are  notable  instances  of 
churches  which  have  been  wise  enough  to 
approach  them  with  this  message  and  have 
found  that  it  developed  a  response  to  the  claim 
of  the  Carpenter  upon  the  personal  life. 

In  every  type  of  community — in  city,  town, 
village,  and  open  country — the  power  of  those 
churches  which  have  united  with  a  vigorous 
evangelistic  effort  to  transform  individual 
lives  a  powerful  appeal  to  the  heart  of  the 
community  indicates  that  the  evangelism  of 
the  future  is  one  which  purposes  to  accom- 
plish the  redemption  of  both  the  individual 
and  the  social  order. 

The  justification  for  requiring  evangelism 
to  be  conscious  of  its  social  goal  lies  in  the 
organic  nature  of  society.  If  our  fathers  de- 
veloped an  evangelism  that  considered  indi- 

[9] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


viduals  alone,  it  was  because  they  lived  in  a 
world  which  was  composed  of  individuals  and 
little  more.  Their  work  was  adequate  for 
their  day.  It  calls,  not  for  imitation  of  its 
method,  but  for  the  matching  of  its  adequacy 
in  a  very  different  day.  We  live  in  a  time 
when  sociology  has  revealed  to  us  a  world  in 
which  the  individual,  considered  apart  from 
his  interrelationships  with  others,  does  not 
exist.  We  have  a  social  consciousness ;  we  are 
aware  of  our  relation  to  the  organic  world  of 
humanity.  We  develop  a  social  conscience 
and  a  social  will  to  direct  the  common  efforts 
of  mankind.  By  these  facts  the  whole  world 
is  changed  for  us,  even  as  it  was  changed  for 
the  men  who  first  became  aware  of  the  great 
fact  that  the  physical  universe  is  not  a  mere 
assemblage  of  atoms  but  an  organized  system, 
moving  by  definite  laws.  The  fact  that  society 
is  an  organism  must  be  reckoned  with  by  reli- 
gious statesmanship. 

The  extent  to  which  the  organic  conception 

[lO] 


WHAT  IT  IS 


of  society  is  valid  is  of  course  a  question.  The 
position  of  modern  sociology  may  be  fairly 
summarized  as  follows :  The  individual  is  not 
a  dependent  creature,  completely  subordi- 
nate to  the  group,  as  in  many  primitive 
communities.  The  individual  is  not  inde- 
pendent of  the  group,  creating  the  com- 
munity by  his  contacts  with  other  individ- 
uals, as  in  the  theory  of  the  eighteenth  century 
philosophers.  The  individual  and  the  com- 
munity are  interdependent.  He  is  the  cell  in 
the  social  organism,  and  here,  as  in  all  forms 
of  organic  life,  the  cell  and  the  organism  live 
by  and  for  each  other.  The  individual  is  a 
member  of  a  number  of  organic  social 
groups, — the  family,  the  Church,  the  state,  in- 
dustry. These  in  their  turn  make  up  the  wider 
social  order,  the  organic  world  of  which  he  is 
a  part  in  and  through  these  smaller  organisms, 
even  as  the  cell  is  a  part  of  the  bodily  organism 
through  its  members  or  organs. 

Let  it  be  freely  admitted  that  the  organic 

[II] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


concept  of  society  is  not  entirely  adequate, 
for  life  is  always  greater  than  our  definitions 
and  explanations.  Yet  it  is  still  the  most 
appropriate  and  complete  conception  that  can 
be  used,  for  modern  biology  includes  in  the 
term  '^organism"  the  spiritual  aspects  of  life 
and  does  not  limit  it  to  merely  physical 
phenomena. 

The  organic  conception  of  society  holds 
that  the  social  order  is  not  simply  a  number 
of  individual  lives  with  their  different  inter- 
ests amalgamated.  It  declares  that  society 
has  developed  as  a  group  life,  in  which  the 
individual  has  developed  as  an  organic  part. 

It  points  out  that  the  primary  impulses  of 
the  individual — the  impulse  to  provide  food 
and  shelter,  the  impulse  to  propagate  his  kind 
— are  social  impulses.  They  cannot  be  prop- 
erly satisfied  without  the  cooperation  of 
others.  This  fact  requires  their  control  for 
the  common  good,  and  herein  are  the  begin- 
nings of  the  community  life.    First  comes  the 

[12] 


WHAT  IT  IS 


family,  then  the  tribe  or  clan,  then  the  state 
or  nation.  Finally  a  world-wide  collective 
life  appears.  This  collective  life  develops  its 
own  organs  and  functions,  becomes  capable  of 
determining  and  realizing  its  own  collective 
end  in  government,  religion,  and  industry,  and 
moves  toward  the  brotherhood  of  man. 

In  all  of  this  collective  development  the 
individual  shares.  It  depends  upon  him,  but 
it  goes  beyond  him.  The  life  of  any  social 
group,  for  instance  a  church,  is  more  than  the 
life  of  the  individuals  who  compose  it.  They 
live  for  it  and  sometimes  they  die  for  it,  mak- 
ing its  larger  life,  by  which  they  are  in  turn 
strengthened  and  developed.  In  the  wider 
social  order  this  is  increasingly  true.  The 
social  will  is  very  much  more  than  the  aggre- 
gate of  the  individual  wills.  The  social  con- 
science is  different  from  the  mere  addition  of 
the  individual  consciences.  The  social  mind  is 
something  more  than  the  sum  of  the  individual 
intelligences.    If  any  one  wants  to  determine 

[13] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


this  difference,  let  him  follow  the  delibera- 
tions and  decisions  of  any  group  of  educated 
men,  for  instance  a  college  faculty.  Let 
him  observe  the  compromise  of  individual 
consciences  in  group  judgments,  for  example 
the  verdicts  of  an  ecclesiastical  court.  Let  him 
see  "good  citizens"  carried  away  by  a  mob 
into  a  frenzy  of  barbarism.  Let  him  watch 
the  will  of  a  nation  set  for  war  sweep  individ- 
uals before  it.  Decisions  are  made  to  which 
the  individual  mind  or  conscience  acting  apart 
would  never  consent;  acts  are  done  which  the 
individual  will  moving  alone  would  never 
initiate.  In  this  sphere  of  the  different  results 
between  the  group  action  and  the  sum  of  the 
separate  actions  of  individuals,  we  trace  the 
action  of  the  collective  mind,  conscience,  and 
will — something  which  does  not  exist  apart 
from  the  individuals  which  compose  it,  but 
which  is  yet  more  than  they.  It  is  this  some- 
thing more,  this  formation  and  product  of  the 
manifold    interrelationships    of    individuals, 

[14] 


WHAT  IT  IS 


which  is  neglected  in  the  evangelism  that  deals 
only  with  individuals.  This  becomes  a  fatal 
oversight  if  the  purpose  is  to  establish  Chris- 
tianity in  the  organic  life  of  men,  to  develop 
a  kingdom  of  God  on  earth.  Hence  the  neces- 
sity for  insisting  upon  an  evangelism  that  shall 
be  directed  at  the  group  life  of  men  as  well 
as  at  individuals,  that  shall  make  the  social 
mind  alight  with  the  truth  of  God,  the  social 
conscience  quickened  with  the  righteousness 
of  God,  and  the  social  will  in  harmony  with 
the  eternal  purpose  of  God.  Such  an  evangel- 
ism will  have  authority  in  modern  life,  will 
gain  a  wider  vision  and  a  deeper  intensity,  will 
reach  to  the  very  heart  of  the  world. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  Christianity  has  always 
expressed  itself  in  group  terms,  has  always 
vitally  affected  the  organic  life  of  man.  It 
grew  out  of  a  faith  which  tried  to  organize 
religion  in  community  life  and  which 
expressed  the  intimate  relations  of  the  soul 
with  God  in  group  terms.    It  came  naturally 

[15] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


to  speak  of  the  Divine  as  Father,  the  race  as 
children,  the  Redeemer  as  Son  of  man.  Its 
great  moments  of  spiritual  potency  have 
always  been  followed  by  significant  group 
movements.  The  ever-living  Christ  has 
always  come  where  the  group  is, — ^^two  or 
three,"  the  family,  the  Church,  the  nation,  the 
race.  Early  Christianity  attempted  to  organ- 
ize a  fraternal  community,  the  Reformation 
gave  birth  to  modern  democracy,  the  Evan- 
gelical Revival  developed  the  desire  for  race 
solidarity  and  began  those  practical  move- 
ments which  will  make  it  possible. 

All  the  great  evangelists — men  as  diverse 
as  Savonarola  and  Moody — appealed  to  the 
social  conscience  of  their  times,  were  social 
forces.  The  prophets  did  something  more 
than  rebuke  kings :  they  appealed  to  the  heart 
of  the  nation;  preached  social  justice.  Jesus 
came  to  Golgotha,  not  because  his  teachings 
disturbed  the  complacent  orthodoxy  of  the 
rabbis,  but  because  his  great  gospel  of  the 
[i6] 


WHAT  IT  IS 


Kingdom  was  in  dynamic  opposition  to  the 
utterly  selfish  lives  of  the  chief  priests  and 
scribes,  ''the  rulers  of  the  people."  The  apos- 
tles found  themselves  in  prison,  not  because 
they  taught  a  new  doctrine,  but  because  they 
ran  counter  to  the  social  current  of  their  time 
— "turned  the  world  upside  down." 

These  all  were  social  evangelists.  With 
deadly  precision  they  hit  the  individual  with 
their  message,  but  with  the  same  effectiveness 
they  struck  home  to  the  social  conscience. 
The  fallacy  that  an  individualistic  gospel 
would  somehow  work  out  for  the  social  good 
never  deceived  them.  They  had  not  studied 
social  psychology,  but  they  knew  that  religion 
can  move  men  individually  without  moving 
them  in  the  mass,  if  it  does  not  appeal  to  them 
in  their  group  relations.  As  a  matter  of  fact  '^ 
the  inadequacy  of  a  purely  individual  evangel- 
ism is  painfully  apparent.  It  has  not  saved  l^ 
our  cities  nor  our  corporations.  It  has 
presented  us  with  the  fact  that  many  of  the 

[17] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


V 


men  at  the  head  of  the  unsocial  forms  of  busi- 
ness are  members  in  good  standing  in  evangel- 
ical churches.  It  has  shown  us  that  you  may 
save  souls  according  to  its  standards,  with- 
out saving  men.  Its  very  incompleteness  pro- 
claims aloud  the  fact  that  an  effective  evangel- 
ism must  make  its  definite  appeal  to  men  in 
their  social  relations.  The  gospel  of  the 
Kingdom  insists  that  a  man  can  have  no  rela- 
tion with  God  apart  from  his  relations  to  his 
neighbor,  that  religion  is  life  and  is  emphat- 
ically a  family  affair,  which  means  that  with- 
out losing  any  of  its  individual  definiteness 
and  effectiveness,  evangelism  must  have  a  con- 
scious social  aim  and  purpose. 

The  contacts  of  Christianity  with  the  group 
life  of  men  have  been  mostly  unconscious. 
They  have  been  the  indirect  result  of  its  inher- 
ent social  nature  and  purpose.  They  have  been 
its  contributions  to  the  slow  process  of  social 
evolution.  The  time  has  now  come  to  accel- 
erate this  process,  to  arouse  to  consciousness 
[i8] 


WHAT  IT  IS 


and  to  organize  for  action  the  forces  that  are 
able  to  control  the  progress  of  the  nation  and 
ultimately  of  the  race.  This  requires  a  direct 
evangelistic  appeal.  Just  as  the  pioneer 
ministers  awakened  the  forces  that  molded 
the  growing  community  life  in  the  Middle 
West,  so  must  our  modern  evangelists  still 
more  consciously  arouse  and  organize  the 
forces  that  are  to  mold  the  world  of  to- 
morrow. Social  evangelism,  which  has  been 
the  partially  perceived  fact  of  the  past,  must 
be  the  fully  recognized  fact  of  the  present. 

This  necessity  is  recognized  in  the  changed 
conception  of  the  relation  of  the  church  to  the 
community.  It  is  coming  to  be  accepted  that 
the  church  exists,  not  to  build  up  itself,  but 
to  build  up  the  community,  that  the  good 
pastor  is  not  the  one  who  merely  develops  a 
good  church  but  the  one  who  makes  a  com- 
munity good.  The  strong  churches  are  those 
which  regard  themselves  as  missionary  out- 
posts of  the  kingdom  of  God  in  an  environ- 

[19] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


ment  not  yet  Christianized,  which  are  facing 
the  dut}^  of  evangelizing  the  community  life, 
which  have  organized  their  membership  to 
become  a  community  force,  which  are  living 
not  for  themselves,  but  are  willing  if  need  be 
to  die  for  the  saving  of  their  community.  The 
weak,  dying  churches  are  those  which  are 
struggling  to  hold  on  to  their  own  feeble  life, 
to  retain  the  remnants  of  their  original  mem- 
bership in  a  changing  population.  Min- 
istering only  to  individuals  and  not  to  the 
community  life,  they  slowly  pass  to  their  dis- 
honored death.  The  object  of  church  endeavor 
then  is  to  make  the  community  religious. 

What  then  is  a  religious  community?  It  is 
not  a  community  that  is  full  of  churches,  each 
seeking  its  own  sectarian  development,  each 
cultivating  its  own  peculiar  formulas  and 
practise.  It  is  rather  a  community  which  has 
become  aware  of  its  organic  nature,  which 
has  found  its  soul,  repented  of  its  sins,  come  to 
conscious  realization  of  its  powers  and  needs, 

[20] 


WHAT  IT  IS 


and  is  coordinating  its  forces,  including  its 
churches,  in  harmony  with  a  power  greater 
than  itself,  for  the  working  out  of  its  salvation. 
This  process  is  actually  being  accomplished 
in  many  a  community,  sometimes  by  a  single 
church,  sometimes  by  the  federated  churches. 
It  must  everywhere  continue  until  the  Church 
has  poured  the  life  of  God  into  every  function 
of  the  community,  until  that  city  appears  in 
which  God  dwells  with  men  and  they  are  his 
people,  and  in  it  there  will  be  no  temple,  "for 
the  Lord  God  the  Almighty,  and  the  Lamb, 
are  the  temple  thereof." 

The  same  process  which  has  been  going  on 
both  indirectly  and  directly,  unconsciously 
and  consciously,  in  the  local  community  has 
also  been  proceeding  in  the  social  order  as  a 
whole.  At  times  Christianity  has  directed  its 
forces  with  conscious  intent  and  purpose  to 
the  Christianizing  of  the  social  order  in  some 
particular,  and  always  it  has  made  indirectly 
for  that  end.    The  two  fundamental  relation- 

[21] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


ships  of  society — sex  and  property — express- 
ing the  instincts  at  the  base  of  the  social  struc- 
ture, the  one  making  for  the  perpetuation  and 
the  other  for  the  maintenance  of  the  race,  have 
never  been  considered  wholly  outside  the 
scope  of  the  evangel.  Jesus  touched  them 
with  a  direct  message,  and  always  the  churches 
have  had  some  teachings  concerning  them. 
Three  social  groupings  organized  around 
these  fundamental  social  instincts  are  world- 
wide. Everywhere  men  participate  in  the 
family,  the  state,  and  industry.  These  make  up 
the  social  order  as  a  whole.  Christianity  first 
moved  upon  the  fundamental  social  group, 
the  family.  It  taught  that  the  expression 
of  the  life  of  God  in  the  family  group  involved 
purity,  the  protection  and  development  of 
childhood,  the  elevation  of  womanhood  to 
equality  with  manhood.  The  Church  has 
always  proclaimed  a  more  or  less  definite 
social  evangel  in  relation  to  the  family.  The 
result  is  the  Christian  family  group,  the  fin- 

[22] 


WHAT  IT  IS 


est,  freest,  most  ennobling  form  of  social  rela- 
tionship known  to  man. 

In  the  state  the  effect  of  the  Christian 
evangel  has  long  been  manifest.  Its  concep- 
tion of  brotherhood  and  service  as  the  only 
valid  form  of  social  relationship  is  producing 
a  type  of  government  for  the  common  good 
and  not  for  the  special  privilege  of  a  few. 
Wherever  the  gospel  is  proclaimed,  despotism 
is  destroyed,  autocracy  is  replaced  by  democ- 
racy. While  the  Christian  state  is  yet  to  be, 
its  foundations  are  among  us.  This  again 
means  that  Christianity  has  accomplished  an 
evangelistic  impact  upon  the  social  order. 

In  the  great  w^ork  process  of  life — the 
fundamental  struggle  for  food,  shelter,  and 
clothing — the  evangel  is  just  beginning  to  be 
heard.  It  is  carrying  over  into  the  compet- 
itive struggle  of  the  industrial  process  the 
same  principle  of  service  and  cooperation  that 
has  modified  the  strife  of  classes  in  the  state 
and  welded  them  into  a  government  that  is 

[23] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


the  mutual  promotion  of  the  common  welfare. 
Already  industry  is  being  humanized  and 
personalized.  Its  corporate  life  is  being 
touched  by  the  power  of  the  gospel  directed 
immediately  to  it,  is  feeling  after  the  methods 
that  will  enable  men  to  obey  the  law  of 
neighbor  love  in  the  work  process  and,  instead 
of  working  against  each  other  for  self-advan- 
tage, to  work  together  for  the  common  good. 

It  now  remains  to  carry  these  efforts  and 
tendencies  to  their  conclusion,  to  direct  the 
forces  of  evangelism  toward  every  part  of  the 
social  order  that  remains  unregenerate,  to 
accomplish  absolutely  the  Christian  family, 
the  Christian  state,  the  Christian  industry,  and 
through  these  the  Christian  social  order.  To 
put  the  dynamic  of  God^s  life  into  all  the 
activities  of  man,  to  bring  the  social  passion 
to  a  consciousness  of  its  spiritual  nature,  to  tie 
the  social  program  to  the  eternities  and  fill 
it  with  the  power  of  an  endless  life — this  is 
the  compelling  task  of  the  Church, 

[24] 


II 

THE  IMPERATIVE   FOR  A  SOCIAL 
EVANGEL 

THE  imperative  for  a  social  evangelism 
is  found  in  the  mind  and  heart  of 
Jesus.  ''Thou  shalt" — a  social  obligation 
binding  man  to  God  and  his  neighbor — stands 
at  the  entrance  to  the  Christian  life.  It  is  a 
command  which  cannot  be  evaded,  and  the 
winsome  fascination  of  its  ideal  is  more  com- 
pelling than  all  the  prohibitions  thundered 
from  the  clouded  mountaintop.  Its  funda- 
mental obligation  carries  one,  not  simply  into 
the  new  heaven  w^here  God  is  known  as 
Father,  but  also  into  the  new  earth  where  man 
is  to  be  known  as  brother  in  all  the  relation- 
ships of  life.  It  was  the  gospel  of  the  King- 
dom that  Jesus  preached,  and  all  recent  inter- 

[25] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


pretations  of  the  Kingdom  find  its  expression 
in  the  vital  contacts  of  the  workaday  world. 
It  is  to  be  expressed  in  time  and  place  even 
though  its  realities  transcend  them. 

While  the  theologians  were  emphasizing 
the  transcendent  aspects  of  the  kingdom  of 
God,  the  statesmen  of  the  Church  were  ever 
seeking  to  give  it  visible  form.  The  great 
missionary  program  of  Christianity  is  an  effort 
to  obey  the  imperative  of  the  gospel  and  take 
the  world  for  Jesus.  The  vision  of  making 
the  kingdoms  of  the  earth  to  be  the  Kingdom 
of  Jesus  has  always  inspired  his  followers. 
With  splendid  vision  the  Church  early 
fashioned  an  imperial  program.  It  sought  to 
dominate  the  earth  with  one  type  of  religious 
life,  to  establish  everywhere  one  form  of  reli- 
gious organization.  This  plan  of  an  imperial 
Church  substituted  for  the  purposes  of  Jesus 
the  ambitions  of  the  Roman  empire.  It 
stripped  the  Carpenter  of  his  peasant  garb, 
clad  him  in  purple,  put  a  sword  in  his  hand, 

[26] 


ITS  IMPERATIVE 


a  crown  on  his  head,  and  sat  him  on  the  throne 
of  the  Caesars.  History  shows  no  greater 
distortion  of  the  spirit  and  method  of  a  world 
movement.  Promoted  with  superb  skill  and 
sacrificial  devotion,  it  nevertheless  was  fore- 
doomed to  failure.  Before  our  eyes  it  now 
wastes  away  to  its  appointed  end.  Failing  to 
subdue  the  world  to  its  type,  ecclesiasticism 
inevitably  withdraws  from  the  world.  It 
seeks  the  mystic  meditation  of  the  cloister,  the 
futile  pomp  of  the  altar,  or  the  intellectual 
abstraction  of  the  study.  In  either  case  it 
isolates  itself  from  the  great  movements  of 
democratic  thought  and  action  that  are  form- 
ing the  modern  world. 

The  missionary  program  of  the  Protestant 
Churches  is  of  another  sort.  It  has  not  sought 
to  subdue  the  peoples  of  the  earth  to  the 
scepter  of  an  imperial  Christ  whose  delegated 
authority  it  claimed,  but  it  has  proclaimed  to 
brother  men  of  all  races  the  power  of  a  uni- 
versal Savior  to  be  worked  out  in  their  lives  as 

[27] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


he  and  they  might  will.  Its  purpose  has  been 
to  plant  the  flag  of  the  cross  on  the  last 
frontier,  to  proclaim  the  gospel  to  every 
creature.  The  accomplishment  of  that  task 
is  now  in  sight,  and  already  the  missionary 
forces  are  forming  themselves  for  a  more  diffi- 
cult undertaking,  as  their  leaders  are  compre- 
hending the  full  vision  of  Jesus.  With  the 
geographic  world  evangelized,  there  still 
remain  new  fields  to  conquer;  there  is  yet  the 
organic  world  to  be  made  Christian.  There 
is  yet  to  be  evangelized  the  social  order 
in  all  its  activities  and  functions,  developing 
in  each  nation  but  rapidly  fusing  internation- 
ally into  a  world  life.  Because  the  mission- 
aries have  seen  the  life-giving  power  of  the 
gospel  in  the  social  order  of  the  lands  they 
have  evangelized,  and  more,  because  they 
have  gone  to  Calvary  with  their  Master,  mis- 
sionary statesmanship  comes  rapidly  to  the 
full  world-vision  of  Jesus.  It  knows  that 
what  he  wants  is  not  territory  nor  numbers 

[28] 


ITS  IMPERATIVE 


owning  his  name  but  the  life  of  men  doing  his 
will.  It  sees  him  now,  not  as  captain  and  con- 
queror with  sword  and  crown,  but  as  suffer- 
ing servant  saving  the  race  by  virtue  of  his 
sacrificial  love.  So  missions  now  add  to  their 
extensive  campaign  to  preach  the  gospel  to 
every  creature  an  intensive  purpose  to  carry 
the  spirit  of  that  gospel  into  the  very  heart  of 
the  world.  It  wastes  no  energy  in  the  compe- 
tition of  sects,  but  with  all  its  militant  spirit 
unites  all  its  forces  in  the  supreme  endeavor  to 
bring  life  to  the  whole  world. 

This  IS  the  sublime  program  of  Jesus.  His 
gospel  is  a  leaven  to  transform  the  nature  of 
life,  not  a  form  to  which  life  must  be  molded. 
In  the  face  of  the  might  of  Rome,  across  the 
splendor  of  the  Caesars,  the  Galilean  peasant 
flings  his  cry,  proclaims  a  kingdom  not  of  this 
world  but  in  this  world,  held  by  love  and  not 
by  might.  It  is  the  boldest  word  of  human 
record.  Small  wonder  that  men  hear  the 
voice  of  the  Eternal  when  this  man  without  a 

[29] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


country  proclaims  a  world-wide  empire  of  a 
content  vaster  than  the  dreams  of  the  world 
conquerors,  when  this  despised  workman  with 
no  citizenship  talks  of  transforming  all  the 
organized  life  of  men.  His  religion  is  to  be 
expressed,  not  in  creed  nor  form,  but  in  life; 
is  to  be  extended,  not  by  the  acceptance  of 
phrases  nor  repetition  of  rites,  but  by  the 
leaven  of  life.  Mohammed  may  win  his  mil- 
lions by  the  sword,  Rome  may  hold  hers  with 
iron  grip  by  the  power  of  fear,  but  the  Car- 
penter wins  men  and  the  world  by  a  deeper 
compulsion  and  holds  them  by  a  stronger 
bond.  His  Kingdom  is  to  come  on  earth  by 
intensive  conquest — by  the  power  of  a  love, 
mighty  to  save  the  whole  of  life,  a  transform- 
ing leaven  able  to  reach  the  heart  of  society 
as  well  as  of  men,  to  capture  its  motives  and 
its  motor  powers.  This  was  the  purpose  of 
Jesus,  and  his  followers  must  consciously 
undertake  the  task  of  realizing  his  vision. 
An  imperative  to  develop  an  evangelism  as 

[30] 


ITS  IMPERATIVE 


wide  as  the  purpose  of  Jesus  lies  also  in  the 
self-interest  of  the  Church.  Though  it  may 
at  times  have  followed  evil  counselors  and 
sought  strange  gods,  the  Church  has  never 
wholly  lost  the  vision  of  Jesus  for  the  trans- 
formation of  life.  Its  times  of  greatest  power 
have  been  the  times  when  it  has  poured  the 
currents  of  God's  life  into  all  the  associated 
life  of  men.  Its  days  of  strength  have  been  the 
days  when  a  new  vision  of  God  has  driven 
men  to  new  relations  with  their  fellows :  after 
Pentecost,  a  brotherly  community  life;  with 
the  Reformation,  the  stirring  of  the  common 
people,  the  beginnings  of  modern  democracy; 
out  of  the  Evangelical  Revival  the  human- 
izing of  government  and  business.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  days  of  weakness  in  the 
Church,  the  days  of  decay,  have  been  the  days 
of  withdrawal  from  the  vital  activities  of  the 
world.  Ancient  monasticism  and  modern 
pietism  have  both  proved  fatal. 

Like  every  other  organism,  if  it  is  to  live, 

[31] 


/ 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


the  Church  must  find  an  end  outside  of  itself. 
Unless  it  views  itself  as  an  instrument  rather 
than  an  end,  it  dies  at  the  top,  its  leaders 
become  mere  ecclesiastics,  its  evangelistic 
functions  are  atrophied.  Without  this  larger 
goal,  the  Roman  expression  of  Christianity  is 
inevitable;  the  Church  becomes  one  vast 
machine,  consuming  most  of  the  energy  it  gen- 
erates in  maintaining  itself.  It  succumbs  to  the 
/  perilous  disease  of  all  institutions,  govern- 
mental and  religious,  the  obliteration  of  the 
motive  that  gave  them  birth,  the  loss  of  the 
purpose  that  alone  justifies  their  existence. 

It  is  a  self-evident  truth  that  the  Church 
must  either  capture  the  w^orld  for  Christianity 
or  be  captured  by  the  world.  There  is  no 
neutral  ground.  The  only  chance  of  success 
lies  in  pushing  the  battle.  This  is  the  one 
shred  of  truth  in  the  ancient  contention  that 
the  Church  must  control  the  community.  It 
must — but  by  animating  its  life  with  spiritual 
forces,  not  by  an  overlordship  of  temporal 

[32] 


ITS  IMPERATIVE 


power.  The  Church  cannot  even  hold  its 
own  in  a  community  environment  that  is 
unchristian.  If  it  deals  only  with  individuals, 
while  the  forces  of  evil  organize  the  commun- 
ity, they  will  destroy  its  youth  and  deplete  its 
forces.  If  the  whole  powerful  pressure  of 
the  environment  upon  the  formative  period 
of  life  is  to  be  against  Christianity,  the  Church 
will  not  be  able  to  protect  even  the  children 
of  its  own  families.  If  it  would  build  them 
into  the  kingdom  of  God,  besides  its  direct 
provision  for  them,  there  must  be  massed  on 
its  side  the  indirect  forces  of  the  community 
life.  ^'Stick  to  your  job  of  preaching  the 
gospel,"  said  the  leaders  of  the  church  to  the 
preacher  who  was  fighting  organized  vice  in 
his  neighborhood,  and  that  very  week  a 
daughter  of  one  of  their  own  families  was 
ruined  in  one  of  the  houses  he  had  been  seek- 
ing to  suppress!  If  the  Church  does  not  put 
its  life  to  the  hazard,  as  Jesus  did,  in  carrying 
out  his  program  for  the  whole  of  life,  if  it 

[33] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


rejects  his  program,  abandons  the  world  to  its 
fate  and  merely  attempts  to  save  a  few  souls 
from  the  wreck,  it  will'in  the  end  be  swamped 
itself  and  go  down  with  the  wreck. 

On  the  other  hand,  there  is  the  possibility 
of  a  more  tragic  fate.  The  community  may 
become  more  fully  Christian  than  the  church, 
at  least  in  its  desires.  Then  will  the  church, 
which  has  lost  its  birthright  of  community 
leadership,  be  left  outcast  in  its  poverty  and 
weakness.  Already  in  some  sections  of  the 
community  life  this  danger  impends.  The 
Church  imparted  the  spirit  and  forecast  the 
method  of  modern  philanthropy.  Shall  it 
now  leave  it  entirely  to  the  professional  social 
service  group  and  attack  them  because  their 
work  is  not  spiritual?  The  Church  has  con- 
served a  religious  theory  of  government. 
Shall  it  now  refrain  from  the  dirty  business  of 
politics  except  to  excoriate  corrupt  officials? 
The  Church  has  always  had  some  men  who 
have   fearlessly   proclaimed    the   ideals    and 

[34] 


ITS  IMPERATIVE 


principles  on  which  the  modern  labor  move- 
ment is  based.  Shall  it  now  refuse  all  aid  and 
comfort  to  that  movement  and  merely  con- 
demn it  for  its  violence?  The  community  life 
is  feeling  after  God  in  these  days,  and  the 
church  which  does  not  lead  it  will  inevitably 
be  ignored  and  abandoned.  God  is  moving 
upon  the  modern  world  through  many  agen- 
cies, and  the  pietism  that  insists  upon  ignoring 
the  organized  community  life,  that  is  deter- 
mined to  keep  the  church  apart  from  the  other 
human  activities  in  which  God  is  working,  is 
simply  shutting  itself  off  from  God,  now  and 
forever.  There  is  some  glory  in  going  down 
with  the  wreck  in  a  vain  and  mistaken  efifort; 
there  is  nothing  but  ignominy  in  being  left 
a  waterlogged  derelict  because  the  course  for 
the  desired  haven  was  deliberately  abandoned. 
It  is  of  small  moment  to  insist  that  the 
Church  cannot  live  unless  it  finds  a  greater 
motive  than  its  own  life  and  a  bigger  program 
than  gathering  adherents.    The  more  signifi- 

[35] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


cant  thing  is  that  the  Church  cannot  effec- 
tively do  its  work  for  individuals  unless  it  also 
does  its  work  for  all  the  associated  life  of  men. 
The  very  imperative  to  reach  individual  life 
with  the  gospel,  which  is  universally  acknowl- 
edged, involves  also  an  imperative  to  reach 
the  social  order  with  the  same  power.  Per- 
sonal evangelism  in  certain  sections  of  the 
population  is  blocked  unless  it  extends  to  the 
community  life.  Unless  it  deals  with  condi- 
tions as  well  as  with  people,  it  does  but  run  its 
head  into  a  stone  wall.  We  organize  rescue 
missions  to  reach  the  ^^down-and-out"  men  of 
the  casual  labor  group,  the  bums  and  hoboes, 
and,  while  we  are  saving  a  few  hundred,  the 
conditions  under  which  they  live  and  work 
are  wrecking  them  by  the  thousand.  Every 
winter  and  spring  they  pour  into  our  cities 
from  the  harvest-fields  and  construction 
camps,  the  ice  fields  and  the  lumber  camps. 
They  have  been  doing  rough  work,  living  on 
coarse  food,  in  uncomfortable  quarters.    They 

[36] 


ITS  IMPERATIVE 


can  have  no  homes  of  their  own,  and  their 
social  nature  has  been  starved  and  brutalized. 
To  meet  their  social  need  there  are  but  the 
cheap  lodging-house,  the  saloon,  and  the 
brothel.  As  long  as  v^e  do  not  develop  an 
evangelism  that  w^ill  minister  to  the  social 
needs  of  these  lives  and  then  w^ill  reach  back 
into  the  conditions  of  casual  industry  and 
transform  them  also,  the  w^ork  has  only  a  frac- 
tional efficiency.  In  its  approach  to  the  most 
spectacular  outcast  groups  the  Church  has 
already  developed  a  social  evangelism.  In 
order  that  w^e  may  effectively  save  the  drunk- 
ard, we  add  to  the  preaching  of  the  gospel 
that  can  transform  the  individual  the  organ- 
ized effort  to  save  society  from  the  curse  of 
the  liquor  traffic.  We  are  no  longer  content 
to  attack  the  social  evil  merely  w^ith  rescue 
homes,  we  begin  to  mass  our  forces  against 
organized  vice  and  against  the  underlying 
causes  that  produce  it.  As  the  Church  follows 
Jesus  in  a  ministry  to  the  outcast,  as  it  meets 

[37] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


his  judgment  test  of  the  reality  aiui  etFiciency 
of  its  disciplcship  by  service  to  the  poor,  the 
sick,  and  the  prisoner,  it  discovers  that  the 
gospel  of  redemption  is  also  the  gospel  of 
prevention. 

In  the  tenement  neighborhood  the  mission 
Sunday-school  and  the  church  settlement  are 
organized.  Their  point  of  contact  is  child 
life.  They  reach  and  transform  a  group  of 
children,  but  while  they  arc  sa\ing  their  hun- 
dreds, the  slum  is  destroying  its  thousands 
with  its  high  death  and  delimjucncy  rate,  with 
its  development  of  weakness,  ignorance,  and 
inefficiency.  Unless  then  an  evangelism  is 
developed  that  will  Christianize  the  slum  and 
all  that  makes  the  slum,  both  in  industry  and 
government,  the  evangel  to  the  child  life  of 
the  tenement  district  is  but  partially  effective. 
Indeed,  it  was  the  practical  realization  of  this 
fact  which  led  to  the  social  service  movement 
in  the  Churches.  It  was  born  of  the  evangel- 
istic impulse  in  citv  missions.     Its  program 

[38] 


ITS  IMPERATIVE 


was  hammered  out  on  the  firing  line  by  the 
men  and  women  who  arc  carrying  the  gospel 
to  the  darkest  sections  of  our  industrial  cities, 
just  as  the  Japanese  perfected  some  high 
explosives  in  the  field  laboratories  of  the 
trenches  before  Port  Arthur.  Thus  our  city 
missionaries  enlarged  their  message  and  their 
work  until  it  covered  the  whole  of  the  com- 
munity life  and  its  underlying  forces. 

Besides  the  imperative  for  a  social  evangel 
contained  in  the  historic  purpose  of  Chris- 
tianity and  sounded  in  the  present  emergency 
in  the  Church,  there  is  also  that  which  sounds 
in  the  call  of  urgent  need  from  without.  The 
world  which  it  is  the  purpose  of  Jesus  to  save, 
which  the  Church  must  save  or  perish,  is  a 
world  which  calls  to  us  with  the  cry  of  dire 
and  utter  need.  One  source  of  the  evangel- 
istic fervor  of  our  fathers  was  their  vivid  real- 
ization of  the  needs  of  those  to  whom  they 
spoke.  They  knew  their  world.  They 
preached  with  flaming  intensity  because  they 

[39] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


knew  thcv  were  [Mcachini;  to  >imuni;  aiul 
living  men.  With  the  same  certaintv  must 
their  sons  lace  the  social  order.  Tliey  must 
know  their  worhl  and  its  needs,  not  the  world 
of  the  arm-chair  theologian  or  philosopher, 
hut  the  world  of  reality  ;  not  the  identic,  refined 
world  of  the  lihrarv  and  the  church,  hut  the 
hrutal,  harharic  worhl  of  Wall  Street  and  the 
tenderloin,  of  Ludlow  and  the  Marne.  Only 
when  men  see  heneath  the  Li;av  trap[iini;s  of 
our  culture  the  heart  that  is  ''desperately 
wicked''  will  they  he  consumed  with  the  (ire 
that  cries  ''\\'o  is  unto  me,  if  1  preach  not  the 
gospel  1" 

Under  the  dominance  of  the  evolutionary 
view  of  the  universe  we  have  slipped  into  the 
tacit  assumption  that  evervthini^  makes  for 
progress,  that  all  we  have  to  do  is  to  watch  the 
imfoldin2;  of  the  purpose  of  God  and  the 
world  will  come  t(^  its  goal.  This  is  an  all  too 
shallow  optimism.  The  scientific  view  of  the 
universe  alhnvs  us  no  such  easv  lot.     It  shows 

[40] 


ITS  IMPERATIVE 


ii>  a  wurM  which  moves  only  as  men  push  it 
forward  with  infinite  to\\.  All  the  improve- 
ment of  nature  has  been  accomplished  by  the 
arduous  labors  of  men.  If  there  be  any  prog- 
ress, it  has  been  achieved  as  men  liave  discov- 
ered and  utilized  the  forces  that  make  for  it. 
Leave  nature  to  itself  and  there  is  no  evidence 
that  it  gets  anywhere.  It  contains  w  ithin  itself 
the  forces  of  decay  as  well  as  the  forces  of 
progress.  The  Power  which  can  use  one  to 
overcome  the  other  manifests  itself  only 
through  human  agency.  So  is  it  with  the 
social  order.  Underneath  all  its  achieve- 
ments there  lie  close  to  the  surface  the  forces 
of  decadence  and  degeneration.  They  tri- 
umpii,  now  in  communities,  now  in  nations, 
and  again  in  civilizations.  I'hey  are  averted 
only  by  conscious  and  sustained  effort.  The 
world  to  which  we  preach  is  seen  under  the 
white  light  of  science  to  be  literally  and  in 
fact  a  dying  world,  apart  from  the  energizing 
touch  of  those  who  in  their  service  and  sacri- 

[41] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


ficc  briiiL^  to  it  the  power  of  an  endless  lite. 

Into  our  shallow  prattling  about  a  Chris- 
tian civilization  there  needs  to  come  a  stern 
vision  of  the  fact  that  there  are  potent  forces 
at  work  for  its  destruction,  which  Tc  ///  destroy 
it  unless  tiiey  are  rooted  out.  On  three  counts 
the  indictment  of  God  is  drawn  ai^ainst  our 
Western  civilization. 

It  is  depleted  by  social  waste.  The  forces 
that  renew  its  strength  at  the  bottom,  the 
strong  new  groups  of  population,  are  being 
rotted  away  by  poverty,  disease,  and  vice 
faster  than  all  organized  philanthropies  can 
check  them!  Unless  these  be  reen forced  by 
a  great  religious  conviction  of  social  justice 
that  will  remove  the  causes  of  this  waste,  the 
house  of  our  civilization,  weakened  at  the 
foundation,  will  fall  about  our  ears. 

Again,  the  blood  of  the  Western  peoples  is 
being  contaminated  by  race  poisons,  the  chief 
of  them  sex  disease  and  alcohol,  transmitting 
their  destructive  power  with  the  very  germ  of 

[42] 


ITS  IMPERATIVE 


life.  Alcohol  w  c  arc  dct eating,  but  there 
remains  tlie  sterner  death-grapple  with  sex 
disease,  and,  unless  it  can  be  driven  from  our 
midst,  wc  pass  the  way  of  the  older  civiliza- 
tions which  became  impotent  from  this  cause. 
Again,  our  civilization  is  being  torn  asunder 
by  strife.  Its  organization  of  militarism 
around  the  prificiple  of  economic  aggression 
plunges  it  into  a  pit  of  carnage,  and  if  inter- 
national strife  be  abated,  there  yet  looms  up 
all  the  hate  and  hell  of  class  and  race  hatred, 
r.ilher  we  eliminate  the  principle  of  eco- 
nomic aggression  or  our  social  order  goes 
headlong  to  its  Armageddon.  Here  then,  are 
the  forces  that  make  for  death  in  the  social 
order,  and  how  near  they  are  to  its  heart  let 
current  e\'ents  demonstrate. 

W'itliout  the  transforming  power  (^f  a  social 
religion  the  race  dies.  Without  God  there  is 
no  hope  for  the  worhl.  This  is  after  all  the 
ultimate  imperative  for  a  social  evangel — the 
absolute  need  for  the  gospel  that  has  power  to 

[43] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


ba\c  both  man  aiul  the  social  onicr  t'r<»ni  their 
sins  and  to  put  lite  into  the  dyini;  worM.  The 
savini;  remnant  is  here,  as  Elijah  tOinul  in 
Israel.  Those  who  compose  it  do  not  decry 
social  work  nor  with  fnolish  sneers  contrast 
eugenics  and  regeneration,  but  are  striving  to 
put  (jod  into  the  heart  <»f  our  ci\ili/ation,  to 
organize  it  according  to  his  purpose,  to  inspire 
it  with  Iiis  will.  Has  Christianitv  lost  faith 
and  ardor?  Has  it  become  conventional  and 
respectable?  Is  it  becoming  old  and  static? 
Here  is  the  challenge  of  an  unregenerate 
social  order  to  call  it  to  vigor  and  power. 
Here  are  the  great  mass  needs  of  humanity, 
requiring  the  massed  efforts  of  the  churches  to 
cooperate  with  all  other  agencies  of  good-will 
for  their  relief  and  removal.  U trr  is  n  race 
dridtJinuj  fjf  (I  rii\i  cdrth.  ftu  uui  the  r^justruc- 
tive  efforts  rerjuired  to  jjuike  it,  yet  "lidituKj  to 
be  kindled  -uitfi  a  (jreat  dxruimir  emotion  tluit 
shall  drive  the  collective  mill  to  the  ini<jhty 
task. 

[44] 


Ill 


riiK  PLACE  OF  'riiK  ixnivinrAL 


Till'!  necessity  for  a  social  cvani^clism 
is  cicnicii  by  many  who  acknow  Icdi^c 
an  imperative  for  social  regeneration.  'I'hey 
assent  to  the  necessity  for  a  complete  trans- 
formation of  the  social  order.  They  realize 
that  society  mii^t  he  "horn  ai^ain/'  that  it  must 
have  a  new  heart  and  will,  in  tune  and  allied 
with  the  heart  and  will  of  (iod,  hut  they  assert 
that  this  is  heini^  gradually  accomplished  by 
Christianity  in  and  through  the  regeneration 
of  individuals.  They  therefore  insist  that 
there  is  no  neeil  of  any  evangelism  other  than 
that  which  directs  its  attention  toward  per- 
sons. I'his  \iew  that  regenerate  society  is 
merely  the  sum  total  of  regenerate  individ- 
uals— may  be  called  a  theory  of  social  salva- 

Us] 


SOCIAL  i-:v  \\(;i-i  ISM 


tion  by  addition.  It  shouts  aL^aiii  the  hatilc- 
crv,  ^'Preach  the  simple  gospel  aiui  the  rest 
will  take  care  of  itself/' 

This  proposal  is  naively  inconsistent.  Its 
advocates  insist  that  individuals  must  come 
consciouslv  into  the  Kinj^dom,  by  the  exercise 
of  faith  and  will.  When,  however,  they  face 
the  social  organism  they  abandon  this  vital 
truih.  They  insist  that  the  social  mini!  and 
will  shall  become  Christian  unconsciously  and 
indireetlv. 

Sikh  a  position  evades  many  practical  diffi- 
culties, escapes  many  a  fight.  It  i<  of  course 
the  ohl  withdrawal  from  the  evil  of  the  worM, 
the  abandonment  of  its  organized  life  to  the 
outer  darkness.  If  tlie  goal  of  Christianity  is 
entirely  in  the  other  world  and  its  purpose  is 
merely  to  take  men  triumphantly  out  of  this 
world,  then  such  a  policy  is  correct.  But  if 
the  purpose  of  Christianity  is  to  create  the 
civilization  of  God,  then  such  a  policy  is  a 
monstrous   delusion.      It  sounds  delightfully 

[46] 


PLAC'I-;  OF    IIIH   IND1\'1I)1  AL 

orthodox  and  very  pious,  but  practically  it 
docs  not  work.  How  lon^  will  it  take  to  save 
the  world  h\  nuTcly  adding  individuals  to 
individuals?  Into  what  millennium  will  the 
Christian  social  order  be  postponed  it  we  are 
to  uaii  to  accomplish  it  bv  units,  each  unit 
exerting  on  the  whole  simply  its  unconscious 
inlluence""  While  this  process  is  completing 
itself,  evil  gathers  its  corporate  power,  puts 
its  hand  upon  the  forces  of  social  control, 
nullifies  and  prevents  the  evangeli/ing  of 
indiviiluals.  efTectively  interrupts  the  process 
upon  whicli  this  view  depends  for  the  saving 
of  the  community.  In  a  c«)mmunitv  organ- 
ized for  evil  Christianity  cannot  even  retain 
its  own  youth.  Some  of  them  inevitably  sink 
into  the  saloon  and  the  brothel.  In  a  com- 
munity that  is  not  organized  for  good  the 
more  subtle  forms  of  social  \\  rong  afTect  and 
degrade  mature  Christians.  Sharing  in  the 
profits  of  social  injustice,  they  keep  silent  and 
become  blind  in  regard  to  it.     riie  tact  is  that 

[47] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


passive  goodness  fails  of  eflicacy  in  an  unchris- 
tian environment.  It  even  becomes  badness 
as  Christians  unconsciously  participate  in 
social  wrongs  and  tacitly  support  tliem. 
Compare  the  efficiency  of  a  community  in 
which  there  are  a  few  outstanding  good  men 
with  that  of  a  community  organized  for  right- 
eousness. The  one  may  become  Sodom  and 
Gomorrah,  fit  only  for  destruction;  the  other 
will  grow  into  the  city  of  God. 

This  theory  of  corporate  salvation  by  indi- 
vidual intluence  has  been  abandoned  in  cer- 
tain fields  even  by  its  advocates.  They  no 
longer  fight  the  outstanding  evils  of  a  com- 
munity endangered  by  alcohol  on  any  such 
basis.  They  realize  that  it  is  practically 
impossible  to  make  a  sober  world  by  the  proc- 
ess of  persuading  individuals  to  abstinence, 
because  of  the  nullifying  power  of  the  organ- 
ized liquor  traffic.  Therefore  they  attack  the 
saloon,  the  brewery,  and  the  distillery,  and 
they  attack  them  politically.     They  are  not 

[48] 


PLACE  OF  THE  INDIVIDUAL 

content,  either,  to  rest  in  the  theory  that  good 
men  make  good  government.  They  realize 
that  good  government  must  be  definitely  and 
consciously  organized. 

There  is  a  fatal  fallacy  in  the  statement 
that  if  men  be  individually  good  the  results  of 
their  social  action  will  necessarily  be  good.  It 
is  a  conclusion  not  justified  by  the  premise, 
which  is  itself  incomplete.  Part  of  the  trouble 
is  in  the  confusion  of  our  judgment  as  to  what 
kind  of  a  man  is  good.  It  usually  means  the 
man  that  we  like,  one  of  our  kind,  of  our  set 
or  class.  We  forget  that  Jesus  came  to 
unsheathe  the  sword,  to  divide  the  house,  to 
set  friend  against  friend,  and  that  this  prin- 
ciple of  the  social  value  of  conduct  is  just  his 
dividing  agency.  We  insist  that,  because  a 
man  is  a  good  church-member  and  a  charming 
friend,  he  cannot  be  a  great  social  sinner, 
oblivious  of  the  fact  that  this  is  just  the  excuse 
offered  for  the  political  boss.  He  is  to  be 
justified  because  of  his  good  fellowship.     He 

[49] 


SOC  lAL    I  \'  \X(.IIJSM 


^talul^  by  tiic  >;aii;;.  \\{  his  cniuiucl  is  ircach- 
cry  to  the  ^roupi  life,  absolutely  antisocial  in 
its  larger  results.  So  the  failure  of  outstand- 
ing Christians  in  their  social  conduct  becomes 
antichrisiian. 

A  nuiltimillionaire  may  create  threat 
foundatinns  for  social  welfare,  but  the  word 
that  reveals  an  unwillingness  to  face  the  rights 
of  others  condemns  Christianity  before  the 
millions.  Dives  niav  honor  the  atonement  in 
his  will,  but  his  easy  evasion  of  it  in  his  own 
life,  his  willingness  to  let  the  toilers  bear  the 
social  burdens  while  he  carries  no  cross,  makes 
his  theology  a  by-word.  "He  is  an  angel  at 
home,"  said  the  driver  of  a  great  ituiustrial 
magnate  who  had  often  felt  his  kindness,  *'but 
he  is  a  devil  in  business."  A  great  giver  to  the 
church  boasted  that  he  could  always  hire  his 
unskilled  labor  at  iifteen  cents  below  the 
market  rate  :\nA  the  exploited  group  cursed 
both  him  and  his  church.  These  arc  tragedies 
of  the  dual  conscience,  and  they  abourhi  in  (jur 

[50] 


PLACE  OF  THE   L\I)I\  IDl'AL 

churLlics.  riic  same  tra^cii\  appcar>  even  in 
the  ministry  where  the  pressure  of  the  com- 
petitive organization  of  modern  life  limits 
ami  sometimes  destroys  hrothcrhood.  The 
liual  conscience  is  found  in  lives  that  are  only 
partly  Christian;  some  of  their  fiuutions  are 
undeveloped  and  others  are  atrophieil.  They 
are  good  Christians  in  certain  relationships, 
in  the  family  and  in  philanthropy,  but  in 
civics  and  industry  they  are  antichristian. 
Recogniticni  of  the  estimable  (]ualities  of  in(ii- 
viduals  must  not  blind  us  to  their  lack  of  other 
fundamentals. 

The  world  never  can  be  saved  bv  men  who 
recogni/e  the  authority  of  Christianity  in  only 
a  segment  of  their  lives.  For  such  men  Chris- 
tianity does  not  enter  the  business  realm,  and 
the  proposal  to  Christianize  industry  appears 
to  them  absurdly  quixotic.  Without  faith, 
what  works  can  they  produce?  In  this  sphere 
they  serve  not  Christ  but  Mammon,  and  there- 
fore their  influence,  instead  of  making  for  the 

[51] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


saving  of  the  industrial  order  from  Mammon, 
is  making  for  the  extension  of  his  power. 
Before  industry  can  be  made  regenerate  there 
must  be  a  type  of  Christian  who  believes  in 
that  goal  and  consciously  goes  to  work  to 
accomplish  it.  This  type  is  already  beginning 
to  appear. 

The  practical  failure  of  this  theory  of  social 
salvation  by  addition  is  due  to  its  assumption 
of  a  world  which  does  not  exist.  It  belongs  to 
the  individualistic  period  before  the  creation 
of  the  modern  world  with  its  social  intelli- 
gence and  will.  It  is  the  product  of  an  incom- 
plete psychology.  It  never  can  accomplish 
the  redemption  of  the  social  order  by  the  addi- 
tion of  saved  lives,  for  the  simple  reason  that 
the  world  is  not  that  kind  of  a  world — for  the 
reason  pointed  out  in  the  discussion  of  the 
nature  of  social  evangelism,  that  the  social 
organism  is  much  more  than  the  sum  of  its 
constituent  cells.  What  we  have  here  is  a 
problem  of  life,  and  not  one  of  mathematics. 

[52] 


PLACE  OF  THE  INDIVIDUAL 

Society  is  not  the  sum  of  individual  units. 
When  human  beings  merge  together  in  a 
group  the  result  is  like  that  which  follows  the 
mixing  of  different  elements  by  a  chemist.  As 
they  fuse,  a  new  entity  appears  to  which  he 
must  give  a  new  name.  So  do  the  fusing  lives 
of  men  result  in  a  new  entity,  the  social  organ- 
ism, which  thinks  and  acts  far  differently  than 
would  its  individual  units.  They  all  share  in 
this  composite  action  and  they  are  all  parts  of 
this  new  result,  but  religion  must  reckon  with 
this  thing  which  they  jointly  are,  as  well  as 
with  their  individual  existence. 

Everywhere,  as  the  social  organism  becomes 
more  complex,  its  life  becomes  stronger  and 
even  as  in  the  higher  physical  organisms  its 
coordinating  power  over  the  individual  cells 
becomes  greater.  With  the  development  of 
education  and  the  transmission  and  trans- 
fusion of  thought,  the  social  mind  becomes 
stronger.  With  the  increasing  capacity  for 
collective  action,  the  social  will  becomes  more 

[53] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


powerful.  The  relation  of  this  to  the  indi- 
vidual is  presently  to  be  considered,  but  the 
point  is  that  the  surplus  of  the  organic  life 
which  is  not  in  the  individuals  composing  it 
becomes  increasingly  more.  It  becomes  more 
and  more  self-conscious,  more  and  more  cap- 
able of  action  and  self-direction.  Therefore 
with  the  socializing  of  life  the  compulsion  to 
reach  this  social  organism  w^ith  the  evangel 
becomes  greater.  Its  institutions,  customs, 
habits,  challenge  the  control  and  direction  of 
religion. 

But  what  about  the  individual?  Does  he 
drop  out  of  sight?  As  the  world  becomes 
more  does  the  individual  wither?  Is  religion 
to  mass  its  evangel  upon  the  corporate  life  and 
neglect  the  person?  That  the  tendency  of 
social  evangelism  is  to  overlook  the  individual 
is  the  strongest  objection  brought  against  it. 
This  charge,  however,  is  based  upon  a  total 
misunderstanding  of  the  facts  in  the  case. 
Those  who  make  it  impute  to  the  advocates  of 

[54] 


PLACE  OF  THE  INDIVIDUAL 

social  evangelism  the  same  fallacy  which  viti- 
ates their  own  reasoning.  Because  the  social 
order  cannot  be  transformed  without  the  trans- 
formation of  individuals,  they  assume  that 
this  latter  process  is  all  that  needs  to  be  under- 
taken. Then  when  others  point  out  that  indi- 
vidual transformation  alone  will  not  accom- 
plish the  redeemed  social  order,  they  assume 
that  therefore  the  individual  is  to  be  left  out 
of  consideration.  In  both  positions  they  are 
thinking  in  terms  of  an  artificial  world.  They 
are  making  a  contrast  which  exists  nowhere 
except  in  their  own  minds.  Their  favorite 
antithesis  is  whether  the  Church  is  to  save  the 
social  order  or  to  save  souls  from  hell,  whether 
we  need  the  arousing  of  a  new  social  con- 
science or  a  revival  of  religion,  whether  the 
world  is  to  be  saved  by  perfect  laws  or  by 
redemption,  by  a  new  industrial  system  or  by 
individual  regeneration.  The  answer  of 
course  is  ''By  both/'  These  things  are  not  in 
antithesis  but  are  inseparable  complements. 

[55] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


There  is  no  ''either  or';  it  is  ''botJi  and." 
There  is  no  individual  apart  from  the  social 
organism,  there  is  no  social  organism  apart 
from  the  individual.  The  simple  gospel  on 
the  lips  of  Jesus  assumes  this  great  fact  and 
deals  with  both  in  all  their  relationships. 

The  one  way  of  saving  the  social  organism 
is  through  its  constituent  parts,  which  are 
individuals;  the  only  way  the  individual  can 
come  to  full  salvation  is  by  redemption  of  the 
social  organism  in  which  he  subsists.  To 
accomplish  this  joint  end,  men  must  be  evan- 
gelized as  social  beings.  They  must  be  saved 
in  all  their  group  relationships,  not  as  indi- 
viduals abstracted  from  the  world  of  reality, 
withdrawn  from  contact  with  their  fellows 
and  set  apart  in  some  arbitrary  system  of  rela- 
tionships with  God.  The  fundamental  error 
of  those  who  insist  that  an  evangel  which  talks 
about  social  conditions  is  neglecting  the  funda- 
mental task  of  ^'getting  the  individual  right 
with  God"  is  that  they  are  thinking  of  an  indi- 

[S6] 


PLACE  OF  THE  INDIVIDUAL 

vidual  who  docs  not  exist,  except  in  the  realm 
of  theology. 

Only  when  evangelism  attempts  to  Chris- 
tianize the  social  order  does  it  get  a  full  con- 
sciousness of  the  place  and  worth  of  the  indi- 
vidual. Facing  the  actual  man  in  modern  life, 
it  discovers  that  when  the  world  becomes  more 
the  individual  also  become  more.  While  to- 
day the  power  of  leaders  to  secure  the  blind 
allegiance  of  the  mass  grows  less  the  power  of 
the  average  individual  becomes  more,  because 
his  points  of  contact  with  others  are  more 
numerous,  the  radius  of  his  influence  is 
greater,  he  is  a  more  effective  social  agent. 
The  man  who  is  made  Christian  in  all  his  out- 
reachings  and  then  set  to  work  as  a  transform- 
ing social  power  is  a  vastly  more  effective 
being  than  the  man  who  becomes  Christian 
merely  in  his  intellectual  or  emotional  life. 
Therefore  the  acceptance  of  its  social  mission 
does  not  diminish  but  rather  intensifies  the 
personal  impetus  of  evangelism. 

[57] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


The  acceptance  of  the  social  task  of  evan- 
gelism not  only  makes  more  compelling  its 
need  to  reach  the  individual ;  it  also  increases 
its  results  in  the  life  of  the  individual.  Per- 
sonality is  enlarged  and  not  lessened  as  it  is 
related  in  service  and  sacrifice  to  the  further- 
ance of  the  organic  social  life.  As  this  is  the 
method  by  which  social  evangelism  proposes 
to  accomplish  the  redemption  of  the  social 
order,  its  result  is  therefore  an  increase  in  the 
value  and  effectiveness  of  the  individual. 

It  is  the  failure  to  perceive  the  interrelation 
of  the  individual  and  the  social  organism  and 
more  especially  their  effect  upon  each  other 
that  leads  many  social  evangelists  into  later 
reaction.  They  find  in  their  local  community 
work  that  nothing  can  be  accomplished  except 
through  individuals  who  have  been  made 
dynamic  by  personal  religion,  and  they  there- 
fore swing  back  into  the  fallacious  conclusion 
that  all  that  has  to  be  done  is  to  make  individ- 
uals religious.     They  fail  to  see  that  this  is 

[58] 


PLACE  OF  THE  INDIVIDUAL 

only  true  and  efective  when  the  individual 
they  are  dealing  with  becomes  something 
more  than  an  individual,  when  he  is  not  a 
theological  abstraction  put  into  certain  theo- 
logical relationships,  but  when  he  is  a  living 
person  who  through  his  touch  with  God 
touches  also  the  whole  world  of  humanity  in 
which  God  alone  is  fully  known,  and  there- 
fore becomes  a  transforming  social  power. 

Many  folk  raise  the  futile  question  of  which 
comes  first  in  point  of  time,  individual  or 
social  salvation.  Here  is  the  same  misconcep- 
tion of  the  nature  of  the  individual.  Some 
people  see  only  the  fact  that  with  mankind  as 
we  now  have  it  no  better  social  scheme  can 
be  worked.  Others  see  only  the  fact  that  the 
individual  cannot  be  fully  redeemed  until  the 
redemption  of  the  social  order  is  accom- 
plished. Therefore  each  group  works  for  the 
bit  of  good  that  it  sees  and  hurls  recrimina- 
tions at  the  other  for  not  quitting  its  job  and 
coming  over  to  work  with  them.     Both  fail 

[59] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


to  see  that  each  of  their  desired  and  necessary 
ends  depends  upon  the  other,  and  that  they 
can  only  be  realized  as  they  are  realized 
together.  To  slur  either  part  of  the  joint  proc- 
ess is  indefinitely  to  postpone  the  accomplish- 
ment of  the  other.  To  look  upon  social 
redemption  as  something  that  waits  entirely 
^  in  the  future  until  all  individuals  are 
^  redeemed  or  to  postpone  efforts  for  individual 
regeneration  until  a  better  social  order  is  real- 
ized, is  to  put  asunder  what  God  has  joined 
together  in  life  and  what  Jesus  always  co- 
ordinates in  teaching.  Individual  and  social 
salvation  cannot  be  separated  in  point  of  time 
— they  proceed  contemporaneously.  The  re- 
generate social  order  is  accomplished,  even 
as  individual  salvation  is  accomplished,  by 
forces  that  are  consciously  perceived  and  also 
by  forces  that  operate  unperceived.  Like  the 
wind  or  the  thief  in  the  night,  some  of  them 
come,  and  others  are  produced  by  the  con- 
scious labor  of  individuals. 

[60] 


PLACE  OF  THE  INDIVIDUAL 

There  is  an  interacting  development  here, 
a  coordinate  process.  Every  time  a  man 
becomes  consciously  Christian  his  life  helps 
the  development  of  the  Christian  social  order. 
Every  time  the  social  order  becomes  in  any 
part  Christian  it  helps  to  bring  its  constituent 
individuals  into  Christian  consciousness. 
Together  they  ^^press  on  unto  perfection."  The 
regenerate  perfecting  individual  helps  along 
the  regenerate  perfecting  society,  w^hich  in 
turn  strengthens  him  and  helps  others.  There 
are  some  men  who  see  God  first  and  then  their 
fellow  men;  the  flaming  vision  of  the  Eternal 
gives  them  the  passion  for  brotherhood. 
There  are  some  men  who  see  their  brother 
first  and  through  him  God;  the  passion  for 
brotherhood  gives  them  the  consciousness  of 
the  Divine.  Presently  they  hear  ^'Inas- 
much— "  and  stand  face  to  face  with  the 
Master  whom  they  have  followed  afar  off. 
With  the  Christianizing  of  the  whole  of  life 
this  group  increases.     As  life  contains  more 

[6i] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


of  (jod  tlicy  sec  Goei  more  clearly  in  its  work- 
ing facts.  There  arc  manv  men  wiio  will 
work  f(^r  a  regenerate  social  order  before  they 
are  consciously  regenerate  themselves,  just  as 
manv  men  will  \ote  to  prohibit  the  licjuor 
traffic  even  thouL^di  they  drink  themselves. 
Jesus  says  let  them  alone,  for  while  thev  are 
working  for  him  they  are  themselves  getting 
closer  to  him. 

The  more  of  God  we  get  into  life  the  more 
real  he  becomes.  I'he  accomplishment  of  the 
regeneration  of  any  part  of  the  social  order 
helps  all  individuals;  by  so  much  as  thcv  live 
in  accord  with  Christian  standards,  by  so  much 
is  their  whole  life  lifted  nearer  to  the  com- 
plete Christian  life.  If  we  can  get  children 
born  in  a  godlike  community,  their  whole 
ilevelopment  will  there  be  affected  and  shaped 
bv  the  right  standards  of  life.  The  stronger 
the  social  intelligence  and  the  social  will  be- 
come, the  stronger  is  their  power  to  influence 
and  mold  the  mind  and  purpose  of  individuals 

[62] 


PLACE  OF  THE  INDIVIDUAL 

aiul  the  more  necessary  is  it  tluit  tlicir  inllu- 
cncc  shouKl  be  a  Christianizing  intlucncc. 
IHiiis  we  have  an  interdependent,  coordinate 
process,  eacii  of  its  parts  affecting  tlie  other, 
reiiLiiring  an  e\angel  whose  purpose  it  is  to 
reach  togetlier  the  indi\idual  aiul  the  social 
order.  \i  it  is  true  that  ''society  exists  in  the 
cooperation  of  in<lividuals,"  it  is  also  true  tluit 
individuals  exist  only  in  their  cooperation  in 
society.  Therefore  it  is  this  cooperative  proc- 
ess as  well  as  the  individual  that  must  he 
reached  by  the  evangel. 

Since  this  is  to  be  accomplished  onlv  by 
reaching  the  individual  in  all  his  relation- 
ships, the  appeal  of  the  evangel  to  the  individ- 
ual must  be  a  social  appeal,  an  appeal  for 
social  action  and  results,  in  order  that  these 
individuals  may  work  out  social  salvation. 
C^)ntinually  to  appeal  to  individuals  to  seek 
personal  salvation  is  to  arouse  their  selfish 
instincts  and  to  defeat  the  verv  end  of  Chris- 
tianity.   A  purely  personal  evangelism,  which 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


does  nothing  more  than  urge  individuals  to 
get  their  own  souls  saved,  is  obstructive  to  the 
kingdom  of  God.  It  vv^ill  produce  and  has 
produced  a  type  of  individual  who  honestly 
believes  that  his  soul's  salvation  is  the  supreme 
object  of  the  universe  and  that  God  has  indeed 
given  dominion  of  the  universe  to  certain 
favored  persons.  To  attempt  to  save  life  in 
this  fashion  is  indeed  to  lose  it.  A  sound  per- 
sonal salvation  is  accomplished  only  when  the 
appeal  is  to  lose  life  in  order  to  find  it,  to  join 
consciously  with  God  in  the  saving  of  the 
world;  not  to  attempt  to  appropriate  the  bene- 
fits of  Calvary  for  personal  ends,  hut  to  share 
in  Calvary  in  order  that  the  world  may  be 
redeemed. 


[64] 


IV 

NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

WHEN  evangelism  develops  a  social 
purpose,  what  changes  will  be 
effected  in  its  method?  The  method  of  course 
will  be  determined  by  the  aim.  The  aim  of 
the  new  evangelism  is  the  reaching  of  the 
group  life  as  well  as  the  individual.  It  is 
attempting  to  touch  the  social  conscience  and 
will.  It  is  endeavoring  to  change  the  stand- 
ards of  the  community.  It  would  move  the 
individual  to  this  end.  The  results  sought  are 
not  acceptance  of  dogma  or  manifestation  of 
emotion,  but  a  change  in  life.  It  is  new  life 
that  is  needed  and  it  must  be  remembered  that 
life  precedes  consciousness,  that  when  once 
life  comes,  consciousness  will  develop  natur- 
ally.   Instead  of  trying  to  obtain  uniformity  in 

[65] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


religious  thinking  the  new  evangelism  seeks  a 
uniform  quality  of  life. 

The  evangelism  that  seeks  to  develop  life 
^^more  abundantly"  throughout  the  whole 
population  will  at  once  find  access  to  sections 
where  another  type  of  evangelism  has  had 
little  entrance.  These  new  fields  will  in  them- 
selves to  some  extent  determine  methods. 
There  are  certain  population  groups  which 
are  not  now  reached  ef^fectively  by  the  conven- 
tional preaching  of  the  gospel.  They  must 
be  included  in  the  scope  of  the  evangel  both 
for  their  own  sake  and  because  the  commu- 
nity life  cannot  be  moved  unless  they  are 
reached.  There  is  the  poverty  group,  which 
is  not  largely  present  in  our  churches,  for 
there  is  an  economic  standard  for  church- 
membership.  There  is  the  immigrant  group 
which  stands  aloof  from  us  because  of  inborn 
prejudice  and  suspicion.  There  is  the  labor 
group  which,  in  so  far  as  it  is  self-conscious, 
finds  its  activities  lying  outside  of  church  cir- 

[66] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

cles.  These  groups  of  course  more  or  less 
coincide.  They  represent  a  large  section  of 
the  population  which  plays  a  powerful  part  in 
the  forming  of  the  social  conscience  and  will. 
Upon  this  section  our  ordinary  evangelism  has 
made  little  impression.  Conventional  evan- 
gelistic methods  do  not  cross  class  or  race  lines 
to  any  significant  extent. 

Along  with  those  population  groups  whose 
needs  cry  aloud  for  the  gospel,  there  are  cer- 
tain standards  and  relationships  in  our  social 
life  which  are  yet  unevangelized.  These  lie 
in  the  field  of  government  and  industry,  in 
those  associations  which  are  generally  assumed 
to  be  outside  the  sphere  of  religion.  These 
unreached  groups  in  the  population  and  these 
unreached  spheres  in  modern  life  belong 
together.  The  evangel  that  tries  to  reach  all 
the  people  is  driven  to  comprehend  the  whole 
of  life,  and  the  evangel  that  is  willing  to  face 
the  whole  of  life  will  reach  all  the  people. 
The  only  effective  evangelism  for  the  disin- 

[67] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


herited  groups  is  one  that  faces  all  the  needs 
of  their  life,  and  these  needs  cannot  be  met 
except  by  Christianizing  the  economic  and  the 
political  spheres  of  life.  The  moment  the 
evangel  attempts  the  latter  task  it  has  the  ear 
and  the  heart  of  the  groups  that  now  stand 
aloof  from  it.  An  evangelism  which  deals 
with  the  questions  of  bread  and  work,  that 
are  the  dominant  interests  in  their  lives,  has 
instant  access  to  them.  A  church  located  near 
a  Jewish  quarter  started  a  discussion  of  the 
industrial  question  after  the  Sunday  evening 
service.  Crowds  of  Jews  attended,  and  after 
a  few  months  a  considerable  group  of  men 
inquired  on  what  conditions  they  could  unite 
with  the  church. 

The  same  thing  is  true  concerning  a  smaller 
but  more  powerful  group  in  the  community, 
namely:  the  "intellectuals''  who  have  become 
aware  of  the  compelling  need  for  the  recon- 
struction of  our  economic  life  on  ethical 
grounds  and  who  have  turned  aside  from  a 

[68] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

purely  formal  type  of  Christianity  whether  it 
be  ecclesiastical  or  dogmatic.  This  group  also 
is  reached  by  an  evangel  that  has  the  social 
emphasis,  that  puts  them  to  working  out  the 
social  salvation  of  the  communit>\  There  is 
also  the  group  of  luxury,  who  by  their  manner 
of  living  deny  the  imperative  of  the  gospel 
over  their  lives.  They  have  heard  the  gospel 
of  individual  salvation  through  sacraments  or 
dogmas  or  feelings  and  they  are  the  living 
proof  of  its  inadequacy.  The  only  gospel  that 
will  penetrate  the  armor-plate  of  their  self- 
righteousness  is  one  which  deals  with  their 
relations  to  men  in  the  economic  order  and 
convinces  them  of  social  sin  and  of  their  need 
of  God. 

Here  then  is  the  field — to  reach  the  whole 
community'  life  and  especially  those  groups 
which  are  now  largely  untouched  by  the 
gospel;  to  reach  the  whole  social  order — to 
Christianize  the  cooperative  relationships 
which  bind  men  together  in  the  social  struc- 

[69] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


ture  and  especially  those  relationships  which 
have  not  yet  been  brought  into  harmony  with 
the  ethics  of  Jesus. 

In  reaching  this  field  the  methods  of  pres- 
ent-day evangelism  will  be  useel,  but  certain 
of  its  processes  wliich  are  now  incidental  will 
become  central.  To  reach  the  community 
conscience  and  will  as  a  whole,  the  mass  com- 
munity meeting  as  used  by  tlie  professional 
evangelist  is  available.  The  results  secured 
by  these  meetings  are  largely  due  to  the  fact 
that  they  are  able  to  concentrate  so  much  of 
the  community  life  upon  their  objective. 
They  bring  to  bear  upon  individuals  the  full 
force  of  the  great  crowd.  They  are  massing 
for  one  purpose  almost  the  entire  life  of  the 
town  or  city.  They  are  unconsciously  using 
the  forces  revealed  by  a  study  of  crowd  psy- 
chology to  secure  individual  results.  Most 
conversions,  even  educational  conversions  of 
children,  are  accomplished  by  this  focusing 
of  group  influence.     Some  social  results  are 

[70] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  .METHODS 

also  consciously  sought  by  current  evangel- 
istic campaigns  in  the  same  fashion,  notably  a 
repressive  attack  upon  liquor  and  the  social 
evil.  Some  evangelists  now  bring  into  a  cam- 
paign an  associate  to  face  the  community 
with  its  social  needs  and  to  enlist  converts  for 
community  service.  But  for  the  most  part  the 
tremendous  social  forces  massed  in  these 
great  union  meetings  go  to  waste  and  leave 
an  inadequate  constructive  community  result 
behind  them.  What  does  occur  is  usually  a 
by-product  rather  than  a  consciously  desired 
result.  A  year  after  a  certain  town  had  con- 
cluded a  successful  cooperative  evangelistic 
campaign  which  filled  the  churches  with  con- 
verts, it  still  contained  a  segregated  vice  dis- 
trict unusual  in  extent  and  organization  for  a 
town  of  that  size.  When  an  entire  community 
has  for  a  month  considered  religion  together, 
and  there  are  still  overwork,  underpay,  and 
occupational  disease  in  its  industries,  or  hous- 
ing that  destroys  health  and  morals,  it  is  a 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


striking  revelation  of  the  fact  that  evangelism 
has  failed  to  deal  with  those  vital  relationships 
betw^een  men  that  make  up  the  community 
life. 

On  the  other  hand,  attempts  are  being  made 
to  mass  the  forces  of  the  community  for  con- 
structive purposes  without  either  the  religious 
sanction  or  a  conscious  effort  to  generate  the 
religious  dynamic.  This  occurs  in  welfare 
exhibits,  community  institutes,  and  various 
campaigns  for  local  betterment.  The  two 
types  of  meeting  need  to  be  blended  into  one. 
No  evangelistic  campaign  should  be  held 
which  does  not  appeal  to  the  social  conscience, 
which  does  not  face  the  concrete  social  sins  of 
the  community,  which  does  not  call  the  whole 
population  to  repentance  and  jointly  to  seek 
after  the  righteousness  of  the  Kingdom. 
Every  evangelistic  effort  should  find  its 
climax  in  calling  men  to  dedicate  their  lives 
in  concrete  service  to  the  community,  to  live 
the  life  of  God  among  their  fellows,  to  under- 

[72] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

take  certain  immediate  measures  to  this  end. 
No  campaign  for  community  betterment  is 
fully  effective  which  does  not  call  men  into 
the  immediate  presence  of  God  to  consider 
their  duty  to  all  other  men,  which  does  not 
develop  a  realization  of  the  necessity  of  chang- 
ing the  motives  as  well  as  the  forms  of  com- 
munity life.  Conversion  is  a  fact  for  the  com- 
munity as  well  as  for  the  individual.  There 
come  moments  when  the  entire  community  is 
touched  from  above,  is  given  a  new  vision  and 
a  new  motive,  turns  away  from  old  sins 
forever  and  finds  a  new  power  for  living. 
Such  occasions  have  recently  come  to  many 
communities  in  this  country  in  their  change  of 
attitude  concerning  the  liquor  traffic  or  com- 
mercialized vice.  The  progress  of  the  race  to 
God  is  infinitely  slow,  but  not  infinitely 
regular.  There  come  times  when  a  nation  can 
be  born  in  a  day,  when  a  new  world  order  may 
swing  into  vision  over  night.  The  more  pos- 
sible it  is  to  mass  our  forces  of  intelligence 

{7^1 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


and  will,  the  more  we  are  able  at  times  to 
accelerate  progress,  to  put  ourselves  in  touch 
with  the  Divine  for  the  accomplishment  of 
immediate  results.  The  men  who  proclaim 
an  evangelism  which  is  the  power  of  God  for 
the  complete  transformation  of  the  individual 
will  also  include  in  their  ministry  a  like  pur- 
pose for  their  community,  and  may  confidently 
labor  for  this  end.  In  patient  toilings  they 
will  develop  the  community  life  toward 
Christian  standards  in  certain  spheres  of  com- 
mon action.  At  times  they  will  see  the  com- 
munity come  to  consciousness  in  these  spheres, 
accept  the  Christian  ideal  and  highly  resolve 
together  to  sustain  the  measures  that  will  real- 
ize it.  They  will  know  then  that  life  has 
permanently  moved  up  to  a  new  level. 

Another  type  of  meeting  now  being  devel- 
oped is  the  Open  Forum.  This  discusses  cur- 
rent social  and  community  questions  from  the 
standpoint  of  religion.  Its  appeal  is  to  the 
entire  community  and  it  gathers  in  its  audience 

[74] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

all  kinds  of  folk,  in  large  proportion  non- 
churchgoers.  A  high  percentage  of  Jews  and 
socialists  are  always  present.  The  audience  is 
given  full  opportunity  to  question  the  speaker. 
Religion  may  not  take  refuge  in  authority. 
It  must  prove  its  worth  by  the  acid  test  of 
democracy.  In  many  places  such  forum  meet- 
ings have  brought  groups  of  men  impossible 
to  reach  by  ordinary  evangelism  into  the  per- 
sonal religious  life.  In  all  cases  they  have  at 
least  developed  a  common  meeting-ground,  a 
common  understanding  between  groups  that 
are  alien,  and  consequently  have  made  pos- 
sible the  massing  of  the  forces  of  the  com- 
munity for  common  religious  action. 

The  outstanding  characteristic  of  the  forum 
type  of  meeting  is  that  it  emphasizes  life,  not 
dogma,  bears  down  not  so  much  upon  what 
men  ought  to  think  as  upon  what  they  ought 
to  do,  aims  not  to  pass  resolutions  but  to  get 
action.  The  same  type  of  meeting  needs  to  be 
used  in  the  services  of  the  church.    A  demo- 

[75] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


cratic  participation  in  worship  ought  to 
involve  a  democratic  union  for  action.  The 
church  must  develop  more  services  which 
will  call  together  all  the  forces  of  good-will 
to  consider  what  ought  to  be  done  to  make  the 
community  life  better.  Such  meetings  will 
develop  genuine  evangelistic  power.  ^^If  this 
is  Christianity,  then  I  can  be  a  Christian," 
said  the  keen,  young,  agnostic  Jew  after  listen- 
ing to  an  exposition  of  the  teachings  of  Jesus 
in  relation  to  industrial  life.  Men  of  trained 
intellect  have  come  away  from  recent  national 
gatherings  w^hich  formulated  programs  of 
social  welfare  saying,  ^'The  atmosphere  was 
that  of  the  old-time  revival  meeting."  The 
passion  of  the  coming  evangelism  had  touched 
them,  they  had  felt  the  thrill  of  the  new 
revival  that  is  even  now  upon  us.  The  fervor 
of  most  labor  meetings  is  in  striking  contrast 
to  the  apathy  of  many  church  gatherings. 
Men  say  it  is  because  the  labor  meeting  is  con- 
cerned with  the  vital  bread  and  butter  ques- 

[76] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

tion.  It  is, — but  the  religious  atmosphere  is 
generated  only  because  the  group  need  is  con- 
sidered, and  therefore  love  and  sacrifice  are 
developed.  When  the  church  will  consider 
together  all  the  common  needs,  as  Jesus  did, — 
hunger  of  body  and  hunger  of  soul, — then  the 
spiritual  temperature  of  its  meetings  will  not 
fall ;  it  will  rise. 

In  carrying  out  a  social  evangelism  new 
types  of  efifort  will  be  developed.  To  reach 
the  groups  that  have  been  specified  the  gospel 
must  be  carried  to  them.  The  day  has  gone 
when  the  church  could  sit  down  and  wait  for 
the  unchurched  sections  of  the  community  to 
come.  They  can  be  called  by  skilful  advertis- 
ing, but  this  is  only  a  temporary  expedient. 
If  its  object  is  simply  to  enlarge  the  church, 
if  it  does  not  use  its  success  in  turning  its 
crowds  out  to  Christianize  the  community 
life,  its  last  state  will  be  worse  than  its  first. 
The  best  advertising  any  church  can  have  is 
the  outreaching  effect  of  its  life  upon  the  com- 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


munity.  Moreover  there  are  groups  which 
no  advertising  can  reach,  because  of  their 
ignorance  and  prejudice.  The  church  that 
really  wants  to  reach  the  unchurched  groups 
must  go  where  they  are.  The  poverty  group, 
the  immigrant  group,  must  be  reached  in  their 
homes  and  natural  meeting-places  by  the  con- 
versational method.  The  lay  forces  of  the 
church  must  be  organized  to  this  end,  even 
as  the  Roman  Church  developed  its  lay 
orders.  The  labor  group  can  be  reached  in 
its  own  halls,  which  are  usually  open  to  any 
man  with  a  vital  message  who  has  established 
a  contact  through  friendship.  A  new  type  of 
evangelist  must  be  developed  who  will  go 
w^here  men  are  and  meet  them  on  their  own 
ground.  An  organized  propaganda  for  the 
social  aspects  of  the  gospel  needs  to  be  placed 
upon  the  streets.  The  work  of  the  preaching 
friars  and  of  the  Salvation  Army  must  be 
renewed  in  modern  terms.  In  Paris  a  Roman 
Catholic  order  takes  young  workingmen  and 

[78] 


I 


NEW  TIiMES,  NEW  METHODS 

trains  them  in  classes  in  debate  and  discussion, 
sends  them  finally  into  retreat  for  a  few  weeks' 
definite  education,  and  then  sends  them  back 
into  their  workshops  as  conversational  mis- 
sionaries to  their  fellow  workers.  It  is  an 
attempt  to  reach  not  simply  workingmen  but 
the  working  class  with  a  Catholic  view  of 
economic  and  social  questions.  An  effective 
evangelism  must  develop  special  methods  to 
reach  the  self-conscious  working  class. 

The  only  way  the  gospel  can  be  effectively 
carried  to  the  self-conscious  working  class  is 
by  carrying  it  into  life.  When  it  is  lived  in 
the  economic  sphere  it  will  indeed  be  for  them 
the  power  of  God  into  salvation.  This  process 
must  start  w^ithin  the  Church.  If  the  Church 
knows  not  the  power  of  such  a  full  salvation, 
how  can  it  ever  be  the  leaven  to  save  the 
world?  The  Church  is  now  largely  a  middle- 
class  group  whose  ethics,  ideals,  and  forms  of 
thought  differ  from  those  of  the  working  class, 
and  do  not  comprehend  clearly  the  property- 

[79] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


less  mind  of  Jesus.  If  the  group  of  toil  is  to 
be  reached  with  the  gospel  it  is  certain  that 
the  Church  will  have  to  get  the  ''mind  that 
was  in  Jesus"  regarding  property.  They  who 
would  carry  to  the  workers  the  mind  of  Jesus 
must  also  carry  it  to  the  Church.  There  is 
some  justification  for  the  trend  of  recent  evan- 
gelists, from  Moody  on,  to  turn  their  batteries 
upon  the  Church,  for  the  evangel  that  would 
carry  the  power  of  the  gospel  to  the  world  of 
modern  life  is  needed  as  much  within  the 
Church  as  without  it.  It  must  be  continuous, 
not  spasmodic,  educational  as  well  as  emo- 
tional. 

The  evangelism  that  is  conscious  of  its  social 
goal  must  also  be  an  evangel  of  deed.  Its 
aim,  as  previously  stated,  is  to  secure  life, 
not  conformity,  to  reach  certain  unchristian 
parts  of  the  common  life,  and  this  can  only  be 
done  by  action.  The  gospel  of  life  is  most 
effectively  proclaimed  in  actual,  living  rela- 
tionships.   He  who  brought  men  life  touched 

[80] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

them  with  the  hand  of  service  as  well  as  the 
word  of  the  Spirit.  While  he  talked  to  them, 
he  went  about  doing  good.  When  he  fed  the 
hungry  and  healed  the  sick  it  was  a  most 
effective  definition  of  the  gospel  of  love.  The 
gospel  goes  not  one  inch  further  than  the 
evangel  of  life  carries  it.  It  is  still  a  leaven. 
Christianity  has  carried  the  evangel  of  the 
Prince  of  Peace  only  as  far  as  the  results  of 
Peace  Conferences  in  the  actual  modifications 
of  w^arfare.  This  is  the  evangelism  that  con- 
vinces men  far  more  than  the  fine  frenzy  of  a 
propaganda.  Hugh  Price  Hughes  said  that 
in  securing  the  passage  of  the  Factory  Acts 
Lord  Shaftesbury  had  done  more  for  the  king- 
dom of  God  than  if  he  had  preached  many 
gospel  sermons,  and  it  would  be  hard  to  find 
a  more  potent  form  of  social  evangelism  than 
the  manner  in  which  the  non-conformist  con- 
science of  England  has  influenced  its  political 
life.  All  the  social  work  of  our  city  churches, 
all  the  activities  as  well  as  the  life  of  our 

[81] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


settlements,  carry  the  gospel  in  living  form 
that  men  may  see  and  touch  as  when  the  Word 
was  made  flesh. 

There  has  been  no  more  effective  evangel- 
ism in  the  history  of  Christianity  than  that  of 
early  Methodism,  and  English  historians  have 
long  been  telling  us  that  its  greatest  results  are 
to  be  found  in  the  group  life  of  the  English 
people.  It  organized  a  ministry  of  service  to 
all  the  needs  of  the  people  to  whom  it 
preached.  Its  methods  are  embodied  in  the 
instructions  given  by  John  Wesley  to  one  of 
the  preachers  whom  he  sent  to  this  country. 
''I  turn  you  loose,  George,  on  the  American 
continent.  Publish  your  message  everywhere 
in  the  open  face  of  the  sun  and  do  all  the  good 
you  can.'' 

One  of  the  defects  of  modern  church  life 
has  been  the  failure  to  recognize  the  evan- 
gelistic power  of  deed.  Even  a  purely  per- 
sonal evangelism  is  ineffective  unless  it  organ- 
izes an  evangel  of  service  as  well  as  preaching. 

[82] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

The  Salvation  Army  found  that  out  long  ago, 
likewise  every  other  agency  that  tries  to 
evangelize  the  unchurched  groups.  ''You 
can't  convert  a  man  while  his  feet  are  cold,'* 
said  John  Wesley,  and  the  misery  group, 
dumbly  driven  by  hunger  and  fear,  are  imper- 
vious to  the  larger  meanings  of  the  gospel. 
The  life  of  God  will  not  touch  them  through 
empty  phrases,  but  only  as  it  comes  through 
ministry  to  their  need.  The  preaching  of  the 
gospel  to  the  poor  involves  both  constructive 
and  preventive  philanthropy.  These  are 
phases  of  the  evangel,  and  unless  this  be  recog- 
nized both  evangelism  and  philanthropy  fail. 
The  only  effective  effort  for  the  misery  group 
is  that  which  brings  spiritual  forces  to  bear 
in  practical  fashion  for  the  mending  of  broken 
lives.  The  best  way  to  rehabilitate  submerged 
individuals  or  families  is  to  put  them  into  the 
fraternal  fellowship  of  a  church  that  is  flam- 
ing with  the  passion  to  realize  the  love  of  God 
in  service  to  men. 

[83] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


Those  groups  which  are  not  starving  but 
are  suffering  from  the  inequalities  of  life, 
desirous  of  higher  standards  of  living  and 
touched  with  a  sense  of  injustice,  are  not  to  be 
evangelized  by  exhortations  to  be  content  and 
to  remember  that  life  consists  not  in  the  abun- 
dance of  things.  They  will  not  find  the  life  of 
God  in  the  platitudes  with  which  men  bolster 
up  injustice,  but  they  will  see  God  when  men 
make  his  righteousness  to  flow  through  the 
midst  of  the  land  as  a  great  stream.  A  labor 
leader  died  cursing  the  Church  for  its  inac- 
tivity, but  his  fellows  found  the  Church  com- 
mittee at  the  legislature  supporting  the  child 
labor  bill  and  said,  "This  is  religion."  The 
doors  that  are  shut  and  barred  to  an  evangel  of 
the  word  swing  ajar  at  the  knock  of  an  evangel 
of  deed.  The  hand  of  service  is  an  open 
sesame.  If  the  Church  really  wants  to  reach 
the  unchurched,  it  must  cease  to  stand  aloof 
and  to  pass  down  its  charities  and  its  missions. 
In  vital  contact,  with  the  fraternal  spirit,  it 

[84] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

must  minister  to  all  their  needs.  The  churches 
that  develop  a  powerful  ministry  of  com- 
munity service  are  the  churches  that  have  the 
evangelistic  approach  to  the  entire  commu- 
nity, and  even  by  the  unworthy  test  of  church 
statistics  are  the  churches  that  succeed.  The 
living  evangel  cannot  be  denied  and  will  not 
be  refused.  It  is  the  gospel  with  power  and 
its  appeal  is  irresistible.  When  the  Word  be- 
comes flesh,  then  men  see  God. 

But  the  evangel  of  deed  has  a  deeper  power 
than  even  its  capacity  to  carry  the  gospel  into 
the  lives  now  closed  to  it.  The  fundamental 
purpose  of  the  social  evangel  is  to  put  God 
into  the  life  of  the  community  so  that  its  every 
function  shall  be  energized  by  him.  This  can 
only  be  done  by  action.  The  community  must 
work  out  its  salvation.  In  a  moment,  in  some 
great  mass  movement,  it  may  come  into  a 
sudden  consciousness  of  the  life  that  comes 
from  above  for  organized  groups  even  as  for 
individuals,  but  the  power  and  efficiency  of 

[85] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


this  life  has  to  be  developed  in  all  the  slow 
details  of  living.  Here  is  where  the  com- 
munity work  to  which  the  social  service  move- 
ment calls  the  Church  has  evangelistic  value. 
It  would  organize  the  philanthropy,  the 
health,  the  recreation,  the  industry  of  the  com- 
munity according  to  the  will  of  God.  In  all 
these  spheres  it  would  develop  those  just  and 
righteous  standards  and  those  brotherly  rela- 
tions which  alone  can  express  him.  It  is  a 
task  of  infinite  patience  and  difficulty,  but  step 
by  step  it  is  being  accomplished.  Increasingly 
does  the  community  where  the  church  organ- 
izes itself  for  this  evangel  of  community  serv- 
ice become  aware  that  God  is  in  its  midst. 
Increasingly  do  individuals  become  aware  of 
him  and  put  their  lives  into  harmony  with 
him.  So  do  the  standards  of  his  Kingdom 
replace  the  standards  of  the  world,  until  some 
day  it  shall  appear  complete  among  us.  So 
does  the  city  of  God  grow  in  our  midst. 
The  evangelism  that  will  put  the  gospel  into 
[86] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

the  vital  forces  of  the  social  order  must  be 
an  evangel  that  applies  it  to  conditions  as  well 
as  men,  that  deals  with  the  environment  as 
well  as  with  persons.  This  is  the  ultimate 
demand  which  the  social  movement  makes 
upon  evangelism.  It  has  carried  it  to  groups 
of  men  now  inaccessible,  in  an  evangel  of 
deed  as  well  as  of  word.  It  now  insists  that 
the  environment  which  surrounds  men  must 
be  Christianized ;  that  it  must  contribute  to  the 
spiritual  life  instead  of  detracting  from  it.  It 
is  quite  obvious  that  we  cannot  Christianize 
men  thoroughly  unless  we  Christianize  the 
conditions  that  so  largely  influence  men.  We 
must  seek  to  remove  the  conditions  that  wreck 
men  as  well  as  endeavor  to  reclaim  them. 

Those  who  study  the  effects  of  heredity 
and  environment  upon  the  development  of 
children,  recognize  the  latter  to  be  the  domi- 
nant factor.  ^'The  environment  counts  for 
ninety  per  cent,"  said  Jacob  Riis,  after  long 
and  intimate  acquaintance  with  the  children 

[87] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


of  the  slums,  and  later  added,  ''make  it  ninety- 
nine."  Thousands  of  children  of  poor  hered- 
ity rescued  from  the  slums  and  transferred  to 
a  favorable  environment  have  become  good 
and  valuable  citizens.  The  boy  in  the  court, 
the  bum  on  the  street,  are  the  product  of  bad 
social  conditions.  To  change  those  conditions 
will  not  accomplish  the  whole  purpose  of  the 
gospel  in  their  lives,  but  it  will  prevent  them 
from  becoming  bums  and  criminals.  To 
direct  evangelism  toward  the  product,  without 
focusing  it  upon  the  cause,  is  a  policy  that  is 
both  futile  and  foolish.  The  preventive  social 
work  of  our  cities  needs  to  be  hitched  up  with 
our  church  program.  City  missions  and  pre- 
ventive social  work  belong  together.  They 
need  to  unite  in  a  common  effort  the  far-reach- 
ing program  of  the  one  and  the  evangelistic 
consciousness  and  passion  of  the  other. 

To  recognize  the  powerful  pressure  of 
environment  upon  persons  and  to  insist  that 
evangelism  must  deal  with  conditions  is  to 

[88] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

increase,  and  not  to  lessen,  the  personal  em- 
phasis. As  life  becomes  more  complex  the 
environment  increases  its  pressure  upon  the 
individual  in  direct  ratio,  but  man's  control 
of  the  environment  increases  in  the  same  pro- 
portion. Men  are  more  and  more  dependent 
upon  their  environment,  but  it  is  now  a  social 
and  not  a  natural  environment,  a  man-made 
thing  and  not  the  inevitable  decree  of  the  uni- 
verse. The  primitive  man  in  his  ignorance 
and  fear  was  a  slave  to  his  natural  environ- 
ment. He  has  conquered  nature  and  made  a 
social  environment  of  his  own,  and  if  that  has 
brought  a  new  slavery  it  is  his  own  fault.  To 
recognize  the  pressure  of  environment  in  the 
forming  of  life  is  but  to  fling  a  challenge  to 
man's  spiritual  nature,  to  arouse  the  commu- 
nity to  master  the  environment  until  all  its 
members  shall  become  the  free  sons  of  God. 
It  means  the  enlargement  of  personality,  the 
permanent  transcendence  of  the  universe  by 
the  soul  of  man  kindled  by  the  soul  of  God, 

[89] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


the  turning  of  matter  into  spirit,  the  putting 
of  all  things  under  the  feet  of  man,  compelling 
the  physical  aspects  of  life  to  contribute  to  its 
spiritual  development.  This  is  the  final  tri- 
umph of  the  gospel — to  make  the  new  earth, 
which  shall  be  the  city  of  God  come  down 
out  of  heaven  to  be  with  men. 

The  final  distinction  of  the  method  of  social 
evangelism  is  that  it  develops  no  hierarchy, 
creates  no  priesthood.  It  is  a  lay  movement. 
It  puts  all  to  work  in  the  task  of  transforming 
life.  Its  goal  cannot  be  reached  except  by  the 
cooperation  of  all.  It  knows  no  special  priv- 
ilege in  spiritual  task  or  spiritual  culture.  It 
calls  the  men  of  action,  the  workers  of  the 
earth,  to  stand  within  the  holy  of  holies  and 
serve  the  most  high  God.  It  finds  their  place 
of  ministry  at  the  bench  or  desk.  It  puts  the 
touch  of  the  divine  upon  common  folk  at  com- 
mon tasks,  makes  them  coworkers  with  God 
in  the  redemption  of  life,  and  so  illumines  the 
daily  duty  with  the  glory  of  the  eternal. 

[90] 


NEW  TIMES,  NEW  METHODS 

The  evangel  that  is  to  be  wrought  into  deed 
in  the  transforming  of  life  must  find  its  apos- 
tles and  martyrs  in  all  the  vocations  of  the 
w^orkaday  world.  The  seers  and  the  prophets 
may  proclaim  the  vision  and  shout  the  trumpet 
call,  but  the  new  world  is  to  be  realized  by 
the  men  of  science  and  industry  who  will  be 
its  discoverers,  explorers  and  pioneers.  God 
must  come  again  and  again  as  a  servant,  must 
ever  stand  in  the  workshops  of  the  world. 

The  social  evangel  recognizes  no  special 
privilege  of  service  or  suffering.  It  sounds 
the  call  to  heroism  to  all  the  sons  of  men.  The 
men  of  toil  and  trade  are  not  to  be  denied  the 
heritage  of  the  prophets.  The  Christ  who 
went  from  the  carpenter  s  bench  to  Calvary^ 
by  way  of  the  money-changers^  tables  and  the 
judgment  hall,  has  yet  to  take  both  the  men 
who  stand  in  the  place  of  toil  and  the  men 
who  sit  in  the  seats  of  power  with  him  to  the 
cross-crowned  hill.  The  world  waits  for  its 
redemption  against  that  day, 

[91] 


THE  NATURE  AND  CONTENT  OF 
THE  MESSAGE 

WITH  what  message  is  evangelism  to 
reach  the  group  life?  What  truths 
shall  it  emphasize  in  order  to  develop  its  social 
effectiveness?  As  with  the  tongue  of  fire  it 
kindles  the  deed  of  service  and  the  task  of 
renewal,  what  shall  be  the  content  of  its 
preaching? 

The  social  aspects  of  the  evangel  must  not 
be  separated  from  its  individual  appeal. 
Since  life  is  one — neither  individual  nor 
social  but  both, — since  the  gospel  is  one, — 
neither  individual  nor  social  but  both, — the 
whole  of  that  gospel  must  be  continuously 
applied  to  the  whole  of  life.  Line  upon  line, 
precept  upon  precept,  the  social  application 

[93] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


of  the  gospel  to  our  social  life  must  be  made 
along  with  its  application  to  the  personal  life. 
Its  demands  for  the  regenerate  life  in  the 
social  order  must  be  coincident  with  its 
demand  for  the  regenerate  life  in  the  individ- 
ual. We  need  a  preaching  which  w^ill  cause 
the  socially-minded  outside  the  Church  to  see 
the  necessity  of  individual  religion,  and  will 
make  the  individualists  within  the  Church  to 
see  the  imperative  for  social  religion.  Times 
there  will  be  when  special  sermons  or  series  of 
sermons  on  the  message  of  the  gospel  concern- 
ing concrete  social  issues  will  be  opportune, 
but  for  the  most  part  the  most  effective  social 
preaching  is  indirect,  the  natural  and  continu- 
ous unfolding  of  the  whole  gospel.  With 
mighty  shoutings  or  the  thunder  of  artillery 
the  walls  of  some  city  of  evil  may  now  and 
again  be  brought  crashing  to  the  ground,  but 
day  by  day  the  still  small  voice  must  reveal 
God  and  without  sound  of  ax  or  hammer  the 
walls  of  the  holy  city  be  upraised  in  the  midst 

[94] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

of  life.  For  both  these  endeavors,  to  sustain 
both  the  continuous  preaching  and  the  spe- 
cial appeal,  the  preacher  must  have  a  vivid 
sense  of  the  particular  needs  of  the  group  life 
and  a  clear  conception  of  the  fundamental, 
principles  of  the  gospel  which  are  to  be 
worked  out  in  collective  action. 

The  message  of  the  evangel  for  the  collec- 
tive life,  as  for  the  individual,  must  convince 
men  of  sin  and  righteousness  and  judgment. 
The  call  to  repentance  opens  the  gospel  of  the 
Kingdom  and  the  first  social  task  of  evangel- 
ism is  to  show  men  their  social  sins  that  they 
may  turn  from  them,  to  arouse  and  develop 
the  social  conscience.  To  men  steeped  in  indi- 
vidualism, to  a  people  hardened  by  genera- 
tions of  tolerance  of  the  idolatry  of  commer- 
cialism, must  be  brought  home  the  exceeding 
sinfulness  of  unsocial  conduct.  One  of  the 
significant  signs  of  our  times  is  the  stirring  of 
the  consciousness  of  social  sin.  This  nation  is 
being  profoundly  moved  by  the  exposure  of 

[95] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


social  unrighteousness.  We  have  come  to  see 
the  social  sins  of  individuals,  to  realize  that 
men  may  be  good  husbands  and  fathers  and 
church-members  and  yet  bad  citizens  and 
employers.  But  this  is  not  enough.  Far 
deeper  than  the  sense  of  sin  aroused  by  these 
particular  local  v^rongs  is  the  feeling  of  the 
great  injustice  of  modern  society  v^hich 
presses  hard  upon  the  finer  spirits  of  our  times. 
The  waste  of  life  in  our  industrial  civiliza- 
tion, the  inequalities  of  life,  the  hardships  and 
deprivations  of  large  sections  of  the  popula- 
tion, the  stunting  of  their  lives,  the  attrition 
of  their  spirits — these  facts  cry  aloud  that 
v^hether  it  be  in  the  social  organization,  or  in 
the  spirit  of  our  life,  or  in  both,  something  is 
fundamentally  w^rong.  We  are  all  involved 
in  it.  Its  taint  is  on  the  house  that  we  live  in, 
the  food  that  we  eat,  the  clothes  that  we  wear. 
It  is  a  fact,  and  not  a  theory,  that  we  are  all 
accomplices  in  the  injustice  of  our  civilization. 
There  is  no  way  out  except  by  common  action. 

[96] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

The  individual  protest  is  but  the  voice  in  the 
wilderness.  To  be  effective  it  must  reach  the 
community  and  move  the  community.  And 
the  community  will  not  be  moved,  the  com- 
mon action  will  not  be  taken  until  together  the 
people  feel  these  social  injustices,  until  there 
is  a  general  conviction  of  social  sin,  until 
together  we  cry,  ^^God  be  merciful  to  us — 
sinners." 

Social  repentance  must  be  no  vague  senti- 
ment that  will  permit  the  individual  to  escape 
responsibility.  Men  who  are  conscious  of 
rectitude  in  their  personal  life  must  be  made 
to  feel  their  sinfulness  because  of  the  vast  cor- 
porate wrongs  of  our  time.  As  Rauschenbusch 
puts  it:  "As  long  as  a  man  sees  in  our  present 
society  only  a  few  inevitable  abuses  and  recog- 
nizes no  sin  and  evil  deep-seated  in  the  very 
constitution  of  the  present  order,  he  is  still 
in  a  state  of  moral  blindness  and  without  con- 
viction of  sin."  As  long  as  such  things  as  war 
and  poverty  exist  in  our  midst,  every  Individ- 

[97] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


ual  needs  a  profound  sense  of  the  fundamental 
unrighteousness  of  the  system  that  produces  or 
suffers  them,  and  they  will  not  be  removed 
until  this  conviction  of  sin  rests  heavily  upon 
the  majority.  One  evidence  of  the  failure  of 
current  evangelism  to  drive  home  a  sense  of 
our  social  sins  is  that  so-called  good  people  dis- 
miss these  corporate  wrongs  as  beyond  their 
help  or  responsibility.  The  question  of  our 
indirect  participation  must  be  pressed  on  the 
conscience.  A  sense  of  the  social  sins  in  which 
we  all  share  will  lead  back  to  personal  respon- 
sibility. Do  we  profit  by  them?  Could  we 
lessen  them?  The  men  who  drive  home  the 
conviction  of  social  sin  are  the  men  who  will 
drive  home  the  truth,  "Thou  art  the  man,"  not 
by  isolating  some  prominent  persons,  but  by 
making  universal  a  sense  of  individual  respon- 
sibility. Only  so  will  men  be  driven  to  God 
and  to  the  heroic  action  required  by  true 
repentance.  Without  bitterness  the  work 
must  be  done.    Again  the  cry  must  be  heard, 

[98] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

"Repent  ye,  for  the  kingdom  of  heaven  is  at 
hand." 

It  is  a  question  whether  the  quickened  con- 
science that  perceives  our  social  sins  does  not 
exist  in  greater  force  outside  the  Church  than 
within  its  walls.  Aside  from  a  few  leaders, 
the  church  group  is  still  living  in  the  indi- 
vidualistic moral  code  of  an  earlier  age,  a  code 
of  great  force  that  will  never  be  outworn  and 
for  whose  strengthening  society  owes  much 
to  the  Church,  but  a  code  which  is  inadequate 
for  our  complex  modern  life.  A  new  social 
morality  is  touching  the  hearts  of  men.  Will 
the  Church  recognize  it  or  will  it  take  refuge 
in  forms  and  customs,  remaining  content  with 
its  past  achievement?  Those  who  condemn  the 
vices  of  the  publican  and  harlot  and  take  easy 
comfort  in  the  virtues  of  the  Pharisee  will 
find  them  a  cheerless  refuge  in  the  face  of  the 
scientific  revelation  of  the  causes  of  modern 
vice.  Too  often  the  social  sins  and  the  social 
neglect  of  the  church   people  are   directly 

[99] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


responsible  for  the  vice  they  so  virtuously 
condemn.  Who  profits  from  the  conditions 
that  foster  vice  and  lower  the  moral  resistance 
power  of  the  bottom  section  of  the  popula- 
tion? When  the  whole  relation  of  luxury  to 
poverty,  the  amount  of  rent,  interest,  and 
profit  that  is  drawn  directly  from  vice  and 
crime  and  indirectly  from  the  environment 
which  develops  them  is  made  clear,  the  word 
again  is  true  that  the  sinners  of  the  streets  pass 
into  the  Kingdom  before  the  scribes  and  the 
Pharisees.  The  church  group  enjoying  the 
comfort  and  security  produced  at  the  cost  of 
hardship  and  insecurity  comes  to  judgment  at 
the  hands  of  man  and  God  if  its  only  prayer  is 
one  of  thanksgiving  that  the  vices  of  the  streets 
have  not  touched  its  homes.  Until  it  abandons 
the  place  of  privilege  and  the  attitude  of  self- 
righteousness  and  stands  far  off  with  needy 
folk  joining  with  theirs  its  own  cry  for  mercy, 
feeling  its  own  responsibility  of  action  and 
inaction  for  the  great  corporate  wrongs  that 

[lOO] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

press  so  heavily  upon  the  lives  of  the  weak  and 
the  poor,  the  Church  cannot  call  a  sinning 
world  to  God.  By  just  as  much  as  social 
workers  and  thinkers  need  to  reckon  with  the 
sin  of  the  individual,  by  just  so  much  does  the 
Church  need  to  reckon  with  the  pressure  of 
social  sin  upon  that  individual.  The  evangel 
that  would  convince  the  world  of  sin  must 
begin  in  a  Church  that  will  take  the  world  by 
the  hand  and  will  together  pray,  "Forgive  us 
our  trespasses." 

The  gospel  of  the  Kingdom  does  not  leave 
men  enjoying  the  luxury  of  an  emotional 
repentance,  or  the  vision  of  a  new-born  faith, 
while  wrongs  go  unrighted.  The  world  life 
must  be  convinced  of  righteousness.  It  must 
bring  forth  the  fruits  of  repentance.  The 
idealism  of  the  gospel  is  practical.  It  must  be 
applied  in  local  and  general  situations,  in  pro- 
grams for  the  community,  in  legislation  for 
the  state,  in  policies  for  the  race.  Here  the 
evangel  must  point  the  way;  it  must  indicate 

[lOl] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


what  are  the  real  fruits  of  the  repentant  spirit. 
It  must  pronounce  approval  or  condemnation 
of  measures  according  to  its  vision  of  the 
righteousness  of  Jehovah.  All  declarations 
of  the  social  function  of  the  Church  that  do 
not  marshal  its  forces  for  social  action  around 
the  conviction  of  social  sin  and  the  desire  for 
social  righteousness  arc  futile.  To  arouse  the 
hosts  of  the  Church  with  the  battle-cry  of  its 
social  mission  and  to  give  them  no  program  is 
but  to  march  them  into  an  impasse.  To 
expound  the  social  principles  of  the  gospel 
and  then  to  hold  the  Church  back  from  social 
reform  is  to  evade  the  real  and  difficult  task 
of  religion.  It  is  not  the  business  of  the  evan- 
gelist to  marshal  voters  or  to  push  the  Church 
into  the  state,  but  it  is  his  business  to  put  reli- 
gion into  the  organized  life  of  the  community. 
And  in  these  days  of  the  growing  uselessness 
and  needlessness  of  party  machinery,  it  is 
imperative  to  gather  the  forces  of  good-will 
in  every  community  behind  those  measures 
[102] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

which  in  any  degree  realize  the  righteousness 
of  God,  so  that  step  by  step  his  Kingdom  may 
come.  Only  so  can  it  come,  as  it  lives  in  men 
and  is  lived  by  men. 

But  imperative  as  it  is  to  support  construc- 
tive measures  which  will  organize  the  com- 
munity around  the  will  of  God,  it  is  still  more 
imperative  to  educate  the  community  in  those 
fundamental  principles  by  which  the  people 
themselves  may  form  the  necessary  measures 
that  will  represent  the  gospel  in  social  action. 
The  world  must  be  convinced  of  standards 
of  righteousness,  not  simply  of  measures.  A 
social  morality  is  being  developed  around  the 
teachings  of  Jesus.  It  is  creating  a  new  code 
of  personal  ethics  and  inspiring  the  construe- 
tive  social  measures  of  the  time.  These  are 
forming  around  the  desire  for  social  justice. 
The  preaching  of  a  God  of  righteousness  has 
produced  in  society  certain  standards  of  jus- 
tice between  individuals.  It  must  now  de- 
velop  certain   standards   of   justice   between 

[103] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


groups,  to  express  the  righteousness  of  the 
Kingdom.  The  beginnings  of  social  justice 
are  worked  out  crudely  In  the  Hebrew 
national  life,  and  the  modern  pulpit  must 
finish  that  task.  But  before  it  can  rally  the 
people  around  the  measures  that  embody  and 
make  concrete  the  ideal  of  social  justice,  it 
must  inspire  the  people  with  a  passion  for  that 
ideal.  It  must  convince  the  world  of  the 
righteousness  of  a  God  who  requires  men  to 
act  justly  in  their  group  relationships. 

Social  justice  meant  for  the  Hebrews  the 
brave  attempt  so  to  organize  life  that  no  chil- 
dren should  be  born  into  poverty,  in  order  that 
no  inferior  group  might  develop  and  become 
subject  to  the  group  of  strength.  This  same 
goal  must  be  raised  before  the  eyes  of  the 
modern  world,  in  order  that  it  may  adopt  the 
measures  which  will  realize  it.  There  is  a 
disinherited  group  developing  even  in  this 
land  of  opportunity  and  democracy.  Poverty, 
disease,  and  vice,  which  afflict  the  whole  race, 
[104] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

take  a  bigger  toll  from  the  underpaid,  over- 
worked group  at  the  bottom  of  the  industrial 
world  than  from  any  other  section  of  the 
population.  Deprived  of  the  means  of  de- 
velopment, the  children  of  this  group  are  less 
able  than  others  to  fight  against  these  foes. 
Succeeding  generations  become  less  efficient, 
more  ignorant,  and  more  delinquent  until  a 
degenerate  group  results.  With  the  proclama- 
tion of  the  needs  and  rights  of  this  group  must 
the  preacher  of  the  brotherhood  of  Jesus 
shatter  the  complacent  prosperity  of  the 
middle  class  and  make  concrete  the  ideal  of 
social  justice.  "Shall  the  pulpit  take  sides?" 
is  not  a  mere  question  of  passing  judgment 
between  two  organized  groups  in  an  indus- 
trial conflict.  It  is  a  question  of  where  stands 
the  preacher  concerning  the  inarticulate 
struggle  of  the  great  poverty-stricken  mass, 
the  ten  million  folks  in  our  land  who  have  not 
adequate  food,  clothes,  and  shelter,  who  have 
no  equal  chance  with  the  group  of  even  moder- 

[105] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


ate  income  to  secure  health,  education,  and 
moral  development  for  their  children.  Dare 
the  preacher  of  the  evangel  hesitate?  The 
prophets  proclaim  God  as  the  God  of  the 
poor.  A  part  of  the  opening  proclamation  of 
the  gospel  of  the  Kingdom  is,  ^'To  the  poor 
the  gospel  is  preached."  The  gospel  of  Jesus 
is  a  great  "whosoever  w^ill,"  not  merely  for 
everlasting  life  in  the  world  to  come  but  for 
a  more  abundant  life,  even  a  hundredfold 
more,  in  this  present  world. 

The  brotherhood  that  Jesus  taught  as  the 
human  expression  of  the  love  of  God  demands 
the  removal  of  those  artificial  inequalities  in 
our  civilization  that  have  been  crystallized 
out  of  the  natural  differences  of  men  by  the 
laws  of  property  that  concentrate  education 
and  power  in  the  hands  of  a  few,  and  leave 
weakness,  ignorance,  and  inefficiency  as  the  lot 
of  the  many.  Before  the  measures  to  accom- 
plish this  ideal  can  be  realized  the  people  must 
be  given  the  vision  of  a  God  who  demands  not 
[io6] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

mere  temple  worship  but  that  justice  shall  roll 
down  as  waters  in  the  midst  of  the  land,  whose 
Kingdom  is  to  be  found  only  as  men  seek  its 
"righteousness."  The  pulpit  will  not  need  to  , 
spend  its  time  pleading  for  the  support  of 
measures  of  social  justice  if  it  can  inspire  the 
principle  of  social  justice  as  the  great  domi- 
nant rule  of  life.  For,  when  the  people  desire 
the  Kingdom  and  its  righteousness  above  all 
else,  they  will  instinctively  seek  for  and  rally 
around  the  measures  that  embody  it.  To 
rouse  the  passion  for  social  justice  until  it 
shall  be  the  great  emotion  that  shall  move  and 
control  the  collective  will  is  the  imperative 
duty  of  the  modern  evangelist. 

To  convince  the  world  of  judgment  is  also 
the  message  of  the  modern  evangel.  The 
preaching  of  the  law  was  the  work  of  many  a 
great  evangelist.  They  reached  the  con- 
sciences of  men  by  proclaiming  the  offended 
majesty  of  God,  the  terrors  of  his  broken  law. 
Now  the  Kingdom  has  its  law  as  well  as  its 
[107] 


SOCIAL  evangf:lism 


gospel,  aiul  it  is  the  business  oi  social  evan- 
gclisni  to  proclaim  them  both.  The  laws  of 
the  moral  life  arc  not  mere  fiats  on  parch- 
ment or  stone;  they  are  written  nn  the  heart 
of  men,  eni^raveil  deep  in  human  experience. 
So  the  law  of  the  Kini^dom  is  inwroui^ht  with 
the  very  constitution  of  human  society.  It  is 
exact  with  the  precision  of  scientific  facts. 
The  Kini^dom  is  ori;anizeil  arounii  tlie  law  of 
love,  and  the  scientist  confirms  it,  declaring 
that  the  social  organism  develops  only  as  fast 
as  the  altruistic  instincts  tiominate  the  egoistic, 
— that  self-preservation  demands  self-sacrifice. 
The  consequences  of  the  violation  of  this  law 
must  be  proclaimed.  This  business  of  social 
evangelism  is  not  a  mealy-mouthed  cant  about 
love.  There  are  stern  facts  Iiere,  terrible  as 
fate,  resistless  as  doom.  The  continuance  of 
modern  social  sins  means  absolutely  and 
inevitably  the  destruction  of  modern  civiliza- 
tion. When  the  heart  of  society  has  been  eaten 
out  with  greed  and  selfishness,  and  its  body 

[.08] 


NATIRE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

(IcstroNc^i  wall  sensualism  aiui  lust,  legal  aiui 
illcLi;al,  then  It  will  know  that  ''the  soul  that 
sinncth  it  shall  die,''  social  as  well  as  individ- 
ual. 

The  pulpit  must  call  all  of  science  to  its  aid 
ifi  drivini^  home  the  truth  that  we  have  no 
i^uaranty  for  the  permanence  of  our  Western 
civilization;  indeed,  that  its  future  depends 
entirelv  upon  the  elimination  of  certain  evils. 
Tnless  we  can  establish  what  no  other  civil- 
ization has  yet  established,  ri<;ht  relationships 
of  sex  and  just  relationships  in  property,  w^e 
shall  add  but  another  to  the  decadent  races. 
Unless  the  principle  of  sex  purity  be  estab- 
lished in  the  individual  life  and  in  the  social 
code,  the  work  of  our  hands  comes  to  naught. 
Unless  the  principle  of  economic  righteous- 
ness can  be  established  so  that  none  will  take 
more  than  they  create  and  each  will  get  all 
that  he  produces,  men's  hands  will  be  contin- 
uallv  raised  against  each  otlier,  and  there  will 
be  unending  warfare.    Unless  we  can  put  God 

[109] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


into  these  formative  relationships  in  life,  reli- 
gion is  not  established.  When  this  is  done,  it 
becomes  the  partnership  of  men  with  God,  not 
for  the  gain  and  benefit  of  a  select  few,  but  for 
the  good  of  all.  Nothing  less  than  this  is  the 
realization  of  life,  and  unless  religion  domi- 
nates the  fundamental  social  relationships,  it 
fails  and  life  fails  with  it, — there  is  nothing 
left  but  outer  darkness. 

The  preacher  who  proclaims  this  standard 
will  take  his  chance  of  being  called  a  pessi- 
mist, but  he  will  be  of  more  value  to  his  times 
than  those  who  in  the  presence  of  the  gross 
violations  of  the  laws  of  the  Kingdom  by 
modern  society  raise  no  voice  of  protest  or  of 
warning.  The  voice  that  is  "sent"  must  cry 
against  the  social  vices  that  flaunt  themselves 
openly  before  our  temples  and  against  the 
denial  of  the  spirit  of  the  gospel  by  so  many 
of  the  practises  and  standards  of  modern 
society;  it  must  demand  that  social  and  eco- 
nomic conditions  shall  be  changed  to  conform 
[no]        ' 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

to  the  Golden  Rule  and  the  second  great  com- 
mandment of  neighbor  love;  insist  that  the  so- 
called  natural  laws  which  are  supposed  in  the 
text-books  to  govern  the  production  and  dis- 
tribution of  wealth  shall  be  consciously  con- 
trolled by  the  will  of  man  working  in  coopera- 
tion with  the  will  of  God  until  they  become 
the  divine  law  of  love  and  effective  for  human 
brotherhood.  This  is  a  function  of  social 
evangelism  and  it  belongs  in  the  business  of 
the  Church.  We  cannot  live  in  the  wrongs  of 
society  and  think  to  get  ourselves  and  a  few  of 
our  neighbors  to  heaven  by  keeping  the  ten 
commandments,  by  mere  ^'statutory  honesty." 
We  shall  none  of  us  get  to  any  heaven  that  is 
worth  while  unless  we  bring  it  nearer  to  this 
earth  and  bring  this  human  society  a  little 
nearer  to  it,  by  proclaiming  and  living  by  the 
great,  positive,  constructive  law  of  the  King- 
dom. 

The  task  of  social  evangelism  is  not  ended 
when  it  has  sounded  the  call  to  social  repen- 

[III] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


tance  and  proclaimed  the  laws  of  the  King- 
dom and  the  consequences  of  their  violation. 
Some  men  are  driven  from  sin  by  the  thunders 
of  Sinai,  but  more  are  called  by  the  gentle 
voice  of  the  Son  of  Man,  talking  of  the 
Father's  house  and  love.  Some  men  come  to 
repentance  by  way  of  the  terrors  of  the  law, 
but  more  by  way  of  the  beauty  of  holiness.  It 
is  the  call  of  the  ideal  that  woos  men  to  the 
life  that  is  born  from  above.  It  is  the  business 
of  social  evangelism  to  proclaim  the  social 
ideal  in  all  its  charm  and  power  so  that  men 
may  not  only  see  it  but  may  rise  up  and  follow 
it.  When  the  voice  of  John  the  Baptist  was 
stilled,  no  one  sternly  called  the  people  to 
repentance,  for  Jesus  was  busy  preaching  the 
new  life.  Yet  Christ  called  men  from  their 
sins  with  an  authority  that  John  did  not 
possess,  and  even  the  publicans  and  the  harlots 
followed  him. 

This  new  life  that  Jesus  preached  was  not 
for  individuals  alone,  it  was  the  life  of  the 

[112] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

Kingdom.  In  its  human  aspects,  it  was  the 
historical  development  of  the  social  ideal  of 
Israel,  which  stands  as  the  best  piece  of  social 
construction  attempted  in  ancient  history.  In 
the  gospel  of  the  Kingdom,  which  imparts  a 
world  horizon  and  an  eternal  content  to  the 
social  ideal  of  Israel,  Jesus  gives  the  world  a 
social  ideal  which  is  not  a  theory  nor  a  dream. 
It  has  a  historical  basis,  and  embodies  not  only 
the  hopes  of  humanity  but  capitalizes  the 
experience  of  the  race.  It  will  achieve  its  goal 
because  it  has  behind  it  not  only  the  social 
achievement  of  the  past,  but  also  the  uncon- 
querable impulse  for  perfection  which  is  one 
of  the  strongest  forces  in  the  evolution  of 
society,  one  aspect  of  the  hunger  of  the  race 
for  God.  The  day  when  the  social  conscience 
stirs  is  the  day  of  the  ideal.  The  men  who  are 
crying  the  need  of  social  reconstruction  are  all 
idealists.  Whatever  their  social  creed,  they 
all  stand  for  what  ought  to  be  against  what  is. 
And  the  ultimate  statement  of  what  ought  to 

[113] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


be  is  in  the  social  ideal  of  the  Kingdom  which 
it  is  the  supreme  business  of  social  evangelism 
to  proclaim  as  an  ideal  to  be  realized  in  human 
society. 

In  proclaiming  the  practicability  of  the 
kingdom  of  God,  the  social  evangel  makes  its 
challenge  to  faith.  The  evangelists  of  an 
earlier  day  were  no  preachers  of  a  negative 
repentance.  They  raised  the  cry,  ^'Repent  and 
believe."  They  voiced  a  positive  demand  and 
required  the  action  of  the  will  in  the  develop- 
ment of  the  new  life.  Even  as  the  social  note 
in  evangelism  deepens  and  widens  the  nature 
of  repentance,  so  does  it  enlarge  the  content  of 
faith.  Men  now  know  that  the  age  of  science 
is  not  the  age  of  the  decline  of  faith,  that 
the  ^^assurance  of  things  hoped  for,  a  convic- 
tion of  things  not  seen''  now  bulks  larger  in 
the  lives  of  men  than  in  the  days  of  their 
ignorance  of  the  nature  of  the  universe.  As 
science  now  directs  man  to  the  largest  task  of 
his   career,   as  it  summons   him   to  use   the 

[iH] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

powers  which  it  puts  into  his  hands  for  the 
conscious  control  of  human  progress,  it  raises 
the  demand  for  a  still  larger  faith.  Without 
it  this  great  task  cannot  be  accomplished. 

The  religion  that  was  satisfied  with  the  sav- 
ing of  souls,  that  considered  its  task  finished 
when  it  was  but  begun,  inevitably  developed 
a  paralysis  of  faith.  Without  exercise  faith 
became  atrophied.  The  fatal  unbelief  is  that 
which  sits  in  church  and  doubts  the  power  of 
God,  which  limits  his  purpose  and  so  will  not 
cooperate  in  the  redemption  of  the  world. 
Whether  it  does  not  believe  in  foreign  mis- 
sions or  in  social  salvation,  it  is  alike  the  great- 
est menace  to  the  Church.  ^^Indifference  in  the 
Church''  was  the  answer  of  several  hundred 
ministers  to  a  question  concerning  the  greatest 
obstacle  to  their  success.  The  root  of  that 
indifference  is  a  lack  of  faith  in  the  program 
of  God.  The  men  who  do  not  believe  that 
industry  and  government  can  be  organized 
according  to  the  Golden  Rule  will  not  work 

[115] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


for  that  end.  1  he  men  who  subdued  king- 
doms did  it  through  faith.  Such  men  do  the 
things  that  other  men  say  cannot  be  done. 
When  God  can  get  enough  such  men,  tliey 
will  make  a  world  w^hich  men  now  say  cannot 
exist. 

The  church  filled  with  comfortable, 
satisfied  folk  that  believe  in  conducting  busi- 
ness and  government  as  their  fathers  did,  will 
never  save  its  community.  The  kingdoms  of 
this  world  will  become  the  kingdoms  of  Jesus 
only  when  men  believe  in  that  possibility 
enough  to  die  for  it.  Not  until  men  will  die 
for  the  ideal  of  brotherhood  as  they  now  die 
for  the  national  ideal  will  war  cease,  l^he 
pulpit  of  to-day  must  flash  before  the  dull 
eyes  of  men,  to  kindle  their  weak  faith,  the 
vision  of  life  redeemed  to  the  uttermost,  must 
make  men  see  the  deathless  picture  of  the  city 
of  God  coming  dow^n  out  of  heaven  to  be  with 
men.  Then  will  come  the  faith  that  ^4aughs  at 
impossibilities  and  cries  'It  shall  be  done.'  " 
[ii6] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

There  are  three  steps  in  the  development 
of  the  faith  that  will  transform  the  kingdoms 
of  this  world  by  the  spirit  of  Jesus.  The 
evangelism  of  the  Evangelical  Revival  de- 
veloped a  faith  that,  in  the  face  of  the  great 
immorality  of  English  society  and  the  deadly 
formalism  of  English  religion,  dared  believe 
in  the  complete  transformation  of  the  individ- 
ual life.  The  evangelism  of  the  Missionary 
Movement,  in  the  face  of  the  narrow  provin- 
cial pride,  the  entrenched  prejudices,  and  the 
armed  jealousies  and  ambitions  of  modern 
nationalism,  dared  believe  in  the  redemption 
of  all  mankind,  asserted  the  spiritual  equality 
and  the  resultant  temporal  rights  of  the  so- 
called  inferior  races.  The  evangelism  of  the 
Social  Awakening,  in  the  face  of  all  the  bru- 
talities and  sordidness  of  our  Christian  civil- 
ization, develops  a  faith  that  here  in  this 
world  of  time  and  place,  in  the  very  muck  and 
mire  of  life,  with  no  other  material  than  these 
weak  human  lives,  the  city  of  God  can  be  built. 

[117] 


SOCIAL  EVANGKLISM 


It  IS  then  with  an  ideal,  ami  not  a  .s\.stcin  ot 
life,  that  the  modern  evangel  thallent^cs  the 
faith  and  the  will  of  the  race.  The  task  of  the 
preacher  of  the  gospel  of  Jesus  is  not  only  to 
proclaim  this  great  ideal  of  life  hut  to  get  it 
realizeil.  lie  is  not  alone  to  announce  the 
coming  of  the  new  life  hut  to  secure  its  lie- 
velopment.  I'herefore  he  nui^t  point  out  the 
fundamental  principles  on  which  re^t  the 
social  ideal  of  jouv  He  nui^^t  insist  that  the 
economic  anii  political  organization  of  life 
must  be  based  upon  these  principles,  that  they 
must  control  the  whole  of  life,  the  nursery, 
the  school,  the  workshop,  the  legislative  hall, 
as  well  as  the  sanctuary.  These  principles 
touch  the  two  root  relationships  from  which 
the  social  order  develops,  from  which  spring 
all  the  other  contacts  of  men  that  comprise  it. 
One  of  these  is  the  relationship  of  man  to  man 
in  all  the  fellowships  of  life,  the  other  is  their 
joint  relationship  to  things,  to  the  external 
universe,  to  the  phvsical  resources  upon  which 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

life  dcpciuls  lor  its  maintenance  and  develop- 
ment. Around  these  two  relationships  arc 
organized  the  family,  the  state,  and  industry, 
and  Jesus  declared  tiie  ultimate  principle  by 
which  each  of  them  must  be  governed. 

Concerning  the  relationship  of  men  with 
each  other,  he  taught  that  they  must  be 
brothers  bound  by  the  bond  of  mutual  service. 
I'Wcn  as  the  Son  of  man  was  the  sulfering  serv- 
ant, so  those  who  wouM  follow  him  were  to 
take  his  cross  anil  to  be  the  servants  of  each 
other.  He  found  a  world  which  had  organ- 
ized itself  around  the  [Principle  of  selfishness, 
which  declared  that  the  right  of  the  strong  to 
rule  and  to  use  the  weak  for  their  advantage 
was  the  central  principle  of  the  state.  He 
challenged  this  and  proclaimed  another  kind 
of  world.  He  told  his  disciples  not  to  be  as 
the  (jentiles,  with  their  lords  and  rulers,  but 
to  organize  a  brotherliood  of  service,  and 
around  this  principle  is  to  be  developed  liis 
world-wide  kingdom  of  brotherlKJod,  justice, 

[■•9] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


and  peace  in  place  of  the  kingdom  of  selfish- 
ness, oppression,  and  strife. 

The  principle  of  the  right  of  the  strong  to 
rule  for  their  advantage  has  continually 
divided  men.  It  has  ever  given  the  world  two 
conflicting  groups  at  the  extremes  of  society 
— tyrants  and  slaves,  aristocracy  and  serfs, 
plutocracy  and  exploited  wage-earners.  It 
has  developed  the  great  military  empires  of 
the  past  and  inspires  our  capitalistic  indus- 
trialism. Most  of  the  world  can  see  that  mil- 
itarism is  outworn,  that  the  right  of  the  strong 
to  inherit  the  earth  and  to  take  their  will  of 
their  weaker  neighbors  is  no  right  at  all,  but 
the  very  essence  of  wrong,  yet  the  world  does 
not  yet  clearly  see  that  industrialism  is  the 
embodiment  of  the  same  principle,  and  that 
the  destruction  of  militarism,  the  loosening  of 
its  grip  from  government  will  not  bring  world 
brotherhood  and  peace.  As  long  as  the  work 
life  of  the  race  is  left  organized  around  the 
principle  of  aggression — the  right  of  the 
[120] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

strong  individual,  the  strong  nation,  the  strong 
race  to  take  and  to  keep  what  it  is  strong 
enough  to  get  and  to  hold — the  world  will  still 
be  involved  in  hatred  and  strife. 

In  place  of  the  right  of  the  strong  to  rule, 
Jesus  insists  upon  the  duty  of  the  strong  to 
serve.  In  place  of  using  their  strength  to 
secure  special  privilege,  he  demands  that 
they  use  it  to  secure  equality  of  opportunity 
for  the  weak,  to  get  a  place  in  the  sun  for  all. 
This  is  the  challenge  of  the  Carpenter  to  the 
battle  spirit  of  man.  He  would  harness  it  to 
the  arduous  tasks  of  brotherhood.  His  empire 
is  the  reign  of  love,  the  triumph  of  the  spirit 
of  cooperation,  the  enthronement  of  the  will 
to  serve.  When  men  insist  that  this  is  the 
dream  of  an  impossible  millennium,  they  must 
be  reminded  that  the  foundations  of  the  city 
of  God  are  already  laid  in  our  midst,  that  aris- 
tocracy is  gone  in  government  and  priestcraft 
banished  in  religion,  because  free  grace  and 
democracy    together    have    been    preached. 

[121] 


SOCIAL   KVANGELISM 


When  the  nations  ha\c  l)ccii  iiuloctrinatcil 
with  the  teachings  of  Jesus  as  they  liave  been 
with  the  rights  of  the  strong,  then  the  brother- 
hood of  service  will  come.  It  is  the  only 
organization  of  life  tiiat  can  endure.  Only  as 
men  are  nio\ed  by  the  spirit  of  brotherhood 
will  they  seek  together  in  mutual  service  to 
establish  justice,  and  w  ithout  justice  there  can 
be  no  peace  on  earth. 

The  strugu;le  for  pri\ilege  and  power,  for 
the  right  of  the  strong  to  rule,  rends  life 
asunder.  'Idle  effort  of  service  binds  it  to- 
gether. The  organized  life  of  any  species 
develops  only  as  natural  individual  selfishness 
is  overcome  by  the  need  for  cooperative 
action.  One  of  the  sins  of  those  beings  who 
ha\e  eaten  of  the  tree  of  knowledge  of  good 
and  evil  is  that,  having  subordinated  the  prin- 
ciple of  selfishness  in  the  development  of  the 
social  life,  it  comes  again  to  dominance  in  the 
struggle  of  separate  groups  to  control  life  for 
their  own  selfish  ends.     That  great  student  of 

[.22] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

insect  life  M.  Fabre  says,  "i  know  of  no 
instance,  not  one,  excepting  man,  of  parasites 
who  consume  the  provisions  hoarded  by  a 
worker  of  the  same  species.''  Man  is  the  only 
animal  that  uses  his  strength  to  live  off  his 
own  kind.  This  is  the  law  of  death,  and  Jesus 
would  replace  it  with  the  law  of  life.  The 
development  of  his  principle  of  brotherhood 
means  the  abolition  of  all  ruling  classes.  Be- 
fore it  must  go  not  only  pride  of  caste,  the  sel- 
fishness of  special  privilege  and  vested  inter- 
est, but  also  pride  and  superiority  of  nation 
and  of  race.  This  principle  of  brotherhood 
which  must  be  proclaimed  by  evangelism  not 
as  a  sentiment  but  as  the  controlling  principle 
of  social  organization,  will  lead  us  into  race 
solidarity.  When  it  dominates  the  hearts  of 
men,  it  will  establish  the  whole  world  in  jus- 
tice and  righteousness  and  therefore  in  peace. 

There   is   also   a   fundamental  teaching  of 
Jesus  concerning  the  relation  of  man  to  things. 
It  has  been  strangely  deleted  into  trivialities 
[123] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


of  tithing,  but  how  central  it  is  in  his  religion 
may  be  seen  when  he  puts  the  prayer  for  bread 
in  the  same  breath  with  the  prayer  for  healing 
from  sin.  Mammon  is  Antichrist  with  him; 
the  arch  enemy  of  God — ^'ye  cannot  serve 
them  both."  To  seek  things  is  to  destroy  the 
soul.  So  hard  it  is  for  the  rich  to  enter  the  fel- 
lowship of  the  Kingdom,  because  the  desire 
for  goods,  or  the  possession  of  them,  tends  to 
enthrall  the  spirit  and  to  separate  it  from  those 
fellowships  with  man  and  God  in  which  the 
Kingdom  consists.  Almost  does  the  Car- 
penter pronounce  against  property  in  his  stern 
warnings  against  the  danger  of  its  grip  upon 
the  soul.  To  him  all  the  wealth  of  the  world 
is  as  nothing  compared  with  the  soul  of  one 
child.  The  heart  of  his  teaching  concerning 
it  is  that  things  are  a  means  to  life  and  not  its 
end.  The  supremacy  of  man  over  goods,  of 
the  soul  over  the  world,  was  his  teaching,  and 
no  age  ever  needed  more  to  hear  this  message 
than  ours,  in  the  midst  of  its  prosperity.    To 

[124] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

the  times  when  property  has  more  protection 
by  the  state  than  humanity,  when  men  are 
enslaved  by  the  very  power  of  the  wealth  they 
have  created,  when  men  are  held  in  bondage 
by  the  very  machines  they  have  made  and 
which  ought  to  set  them  free  from  economic 
fear  and  want,  when  human  life  is  sacrificed 
upon  the  altars  of  commerce  and  industry, 
with  a  wanton  cruelty  unsurpassed  by  heathen 
rites  of  blood,  there  must  be  brought  the  mes- 
sage that  men  are  of  more  importance  to 
society  than  wealth,  that  the  soul  is  more  than 
the  world. 

It  is  because  men  have  made  property  an 
end  instead  of  a  means  that  they  fight  for  its 
possession.  The  worship  of  Mammon,  like 
that  of  all  false  gods,  is  the  dance  of  death. 
To  rescue  life  from  the  destruction  which 
threatens  it  from  the  building  of  the  house  of 
our  civilization  upon  the  shifting  sands  of 
material  values  is  an  imperative  task  for 
modern  evangelism.     The  last  conflict  of  the 

[125] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


soul  is  to  secure  its  freedom  from  the  external 
universe,  to  shake  ofif  the  dominion  of  things. 
This  must  be  fought  out  in  every  life,  and 
in  our  civilization.  And  the  Carpenter  who 
won  the  fight  himself  holds  the  secret  and  the 
power  of  victory. 

He  teaches  men  that  the  goods  of  life  were 
not  meant  to  make  a  prison-house  for  the  wast- 
ing away  of  the  souls  of  men,  but  were  meant 
to  fashion  the  house  of  the  spirit  in  which 
man  and  God  might  dwell  together.  He 
taught  that  they  were  to  be  used  as  a  means 
to  the  spiritual  development  of  life,  and  when 
men  approach  them  from  this  point  of  view, 
bound  together  by  his  other  great  principle  of 
brotherhood  and  service,  then  shall  they  find 
the  measures  which  w^ill  so  establish  the  com- 
mon control  and  common  use  of  them  that  the 
Kingdom  of  good  shall  come. 

The  evangel  that  is  to  herald  this  Kingdom 
must  teach  a  spiritual  view  of  property,  its 
nature,   its  control,   its   use.     It  must  make 

[126] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

men  see  that  property  is  stored-up  energy,  that 
into  it  have  gone  the  lives  of  men,  their  labors 
and  their  ideals;  that  before  men  developed 
it,  God's  life  was  put  into  the  natural  resources 
out  of  w^hich  the  labor  of  man  makes  it;  that 
therefore  this  concentrated  energy,  divine  and 
human,  may  not  be  controlled  and  appro- 
priated for  selfish  individual  or  group  ends; 
that  if  it  be  slavery  to  attempt  to  control  the 
lives  of  men  for  personal  ends,  it  is  blasphemy 
and  sacrilege  to  attempt  so  to  control  the  life 
of  God. 

To  such  a  vision  of  the  flaming  presence  of 
the  divine  in  the  physical  resources  of  life 
must  the  pulpit  call  men,  that  feeling  their 
sanctity  they  may  sacredly  use  them  together 
in  the  development  of  the  common  life.  It 
must  call  men  to  free  their  own  souls  from 
Mammon  and  then  to  help  set  others  free.  It 
must  demand  that  men  organize  the  work 
process  of  life  around  these  two  great  prin- 
ciples of  Jesus,  that  in  brotherhood  and  service 

[127] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


together  they  make  the  things  of  life  the  means 
to  its  highest  development,  that  so  they  may 
realize  in  their  midst  the  life  of  God  which 
the  prophets  declared  to  be  justice,  righteous- 
ness, and  mercy  and  which  Jesus  declared  to 
be  love. 

With  such  a  message  evangelism  reveals  to 
the  world  a  bigger  and  a  closer  God  working 
with  men  at  the  great  task  of  making  a  godlike 
humanity.  It  aims  at  a  greater  goal  than 
the  evangelism  that  simply  brings  men  in 
touch  with  God  and  leaves  them  in  an  arti- 
ficial relationship  with  him  apart  from  the 
world.  It  abandons  no  part  of  life,  but  claims 
it  all  as  the  territory  of  the  soul.  Thus  also 
it  gets  a  stronger  grip  on  men,  calling  them  to 
a  task  that  demands  their  deathless  powers. 
It  finds  expression,  not  only  through  voice 
and  pen,  but  also  in  the  vital  ministry  of  deed, 
in  the  actual  contact  of  human  relations. 

In  the  face  of  the  social  sins  of  the  times  to 
thunder  the  call  to  social  repentance;  to  make 

[128] 


NATURE  OF  THE  MESSAGE 

vivid  the  outer  darkness  that  waits  upon  the 
civilization  that  fails  to  realize  the  ^^righteous- 
ness of  the  Kingdom'' ;  to  challenge  the  faith 
of  men  to  the  building  of  the  city  of  God  upon 
this  earth;  to  show  men  how  in  all  high  serv- 
ice together  they  may  use  the  things  of  earth 
for  that  house  of  the  spirit — this  is  to  herald 
the  social  evangel;  this  is  to  proclaim  the 
gospel  of  Jesus  for  the  redemption  of  the 
world. 


[129] 


VI 
WHAT  ABOUT  THE  RESULTS? 

WHAT  results  may  be  expected  from  an 
evangelism  which  proclaims  the 
word  of  life  for  the  social  order?  Where 
shall  the  eflfect  of  such  preaching  be  seen? 
Social  evangelism  insists  that  this  question  is 
secondary.  It  demands  that  the  Church  shall 
concern  itself  first  with  the  truth  of  its  mes- 
sage, shall  make  its  program,  not  with  an  eye 
upon  possible  results,  but  seeing  only  the 
necessity  of  getting  its  message  to  the  people 
and  into  life.  To  bear  the  Word  is  the 
supreme  commission.  To  sow  the  seed  is  the 
primary  task;  to  see  the  harvest  is  not  essen- 
tial. 

One  reason  for  the  decadence  of  evangel- 
ism has  been  its  over-emphasis  upon  results. 
Religion  has  become  commercialized  until  it 

[131] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


is  content  with  small  profits  if  only  it  can  get 
quick  returns,  until  it  reckons  the  cost  per 
head  of  its  converts,  until  it  compares  cam- 
paigns as  to  the  number  obtained  the  most 
quickly  and  the  least  expensively.  By  such  a 
test  the  ministry  of  Jesus  in  his  lifetime  would 
be  counted  a  monumental  failure.  His  suc- 
cesses will  not  be  ours  until  we  are  as  careless 
of  results  as  he  was.  His  method  was  to  fling 
out  the  word  and  the  deed  into  life  and  let  the 
leaven  work.  He  put  pressure  on  no  man, 
invaded  no  man's  sanctuary.  He  was  content 
always  to  sow  the  good  seed,  knowing  that  in 
God's  own  time  the  sheaves  would  come. 
Those  who  would  do  the  work  of  the  King- 
dom must  be  as  finely  careless  of  results  as  was 
Jesus,  must  be  willing  to  find  them  in  his  way. 
No  followers?  The  cross  to  carry?  Life  lost? 
Yet  the  Kingdom  draws  nearer,  the  day  of 
men  that  are  brothers  and  a  world  that  is 
God's  becomes  possible  and  he  that  loses  his 
life  saves  it  and  saves  the  world  with  it. 
[132] 


WHAT  ABOUT  RESULTS? 

In  this  matter  of  results  it  is  enough  for  the 
Church  to-day  to  be  as  her  Master.  Among 
the  immigrant  and  labor  groups,  the  evangel- 
ism that  is  looking  first  for  adherents  that  it 
can  count  is  at  once  put  under  suspicion.  It 
fails  to  reveal  the  Christ  because  it  w^ants 
something  for  itself.  In  this  respect  the  settle- 
ment has  the  advantage.  The  Church  seeks 
members.  The  settlement  serves  God  for 
naught,  it  will  save  life  by  the  infusion  of  life, 
and  if  need  be  by  the  loss  of  life.  Too  often 
the  reason  that  the  Church  cannot  save  its  own 
life  is  that  it  will  not  lose  it.  Sometimes  with 
sad  fatuity  it  puts  the  barrier  of  itself  between 
it  and  the  very  people  it  would  reach,  and 
sometimes,  alas,  between  men  and  the  King- 
dom. It  is  time  to  manifest  supreme  faith  in 
the  truth  that  God's  Word  cannot  return  unto 
him  void.  The  chief  concern  of  the  Church 
must  be  to  discover  what  is  the  word  of  God 
for  to-day;  for  that  word  will  still  be  spirit 
and  life,  and  being  dynamic  it  will  clothe  itself 
[133] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


with  form  and  institutions.  To  put  that  word 
at  work  to-day,  even  though  the  result  appears 
not  until  the  long  to-morrow,  is  the  first  duty 
of  the  preacher. 

The  evangelism  that  carries  the  whole  word 
of  the  Master  and  follows  his  method  will  not 
stop  to  consider  results  to  the  Church.  Its 
results  cannot  be  measured  in  terms  of  church 
gains.  The  value  of  the  social  ministries  of 
the  Church  can  never  be  determined  by  what 
they  do  or  fail  to  do  in  bringing  more  people 
into  the  Church.  This  is  no  fair  standard  to 
apply  to  them.  Their  purpose  is  social,  and 
while  they  will  open  points  of  contact  for  indi- 
vidual, personal  ministry,  their  main  results 
will  be  social, — to  be  seen  and  felt  but  not  to  be 
counted.  A  city  missionary  society  put  a  man 
at  work  among  the  Jews  and  then  wanted  to 
dismiss  him  at  the  end  of  the  year  because  he 
had  not  built  up  a  self-supporting  church. 
What  results  would  be  secured  in  China  by 
such  a  policy?    It  would  dismiss  even  Jesus 

[134] 


WHAT  ABOUT  RESULTS? 

as  an  incompetent  blunderer,  an  unprofitable 
servant.  The  Church  must  demand  and  secure 
efficiency  in  its  efforts,  but  efficiency  is  re- 
vealed inadequately  and  sometimes  not  at  all 
by  the  figures  that  show  gains  in  converts  and 
income.  The  love  of  statistics  possesses  the 
modern  churches  as  an  evil  spirit  and  unless 
it  be  exorcised  it  will  presently  carry  them  far 
from  the  path  of  Jesus  and  run  them  headlong 
into  the  oblivion  in  which  the  world  of  to- 
morrow will  bury  those  religious  organiza- 
tions that  can  find  no  bigger  goal  than  the 
development  of  their  own  ecclesiastical  life. 
The  Church  will  find  neither  the  true  mes- 
sage nor  the  true  method  in  evangelism  until 
it  fashions  both  with  a  complete  independence 
of  results  to  itself.  The  avidity  of  a  certain 
type  of  rescue  mission  to  count  its  converts 
produces  what  the  underworld  knows  as  "mis- 
sion stiffs"  who  are  quite  willing  to  furnish 
the  supply  for  this  demand  in  order  to  get  the 
perquisites  in  food  and  shelter  that  go  with  it. 

[135] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


The  institutional  work  that  is  developed 
merely  as  a  free  lunch  counter  to  swell  the 
numbers  of  the  Church,  pauperizes  both  the 
social  and  the  religious  life  of  the  people.  If 
the  Church  approaches  the  conflict  of  labor 
and  capital  with  an  eye  upon  the  crowd  on  one 
side  or  the  money  on  the  other,  it  presently 
earns  and  deserves  the  contempt  of  both  sides. 
Not  only  will  the  Church  fall  in  saving  others, 
it  will  in  the  end  even  lose  its  own  soul  unless 
it  is  delivered  from  an  undue  desire  to  see  and 
count  the  results  of  its  labors. 

The  preaching  of  the  social  gospel  to  the 
immigrant  and  labor  groups  has  actually  in 
many  places  put  the  power  of  the  whole  gospel 
into  the  lives  of  many  individuals  and  brought 
them  into  connection  with  the  Church,  but  to 
attempt  it  for  the  latter  end  alone  is  to  fail 
miserably  of  the  larger  result.  Men  tell  us 
the  labor  crowd  will  fill  the  churches  if  social 
and  industrial  justice  is  preached,  but  it  never 
will  be  preached  if  the  attempt  be  made  with 

[136] 


WHAT  ABOUT  RESULTS? 

the  sole  motive  of  securing  such  results.  The 
justice  of  God  will  be  preached  only  when  the 
preacher  cares  not  w^hether  any  respond. 

One  of  the  perils  of  the  pulpit  is  the  love  of 
the  crowd,  the  tendency  to  count  success  in  the 
size  of  the  congregation.  It  causes  the  ex- 
penditure of  vast  amounts  of  energy  in  the 
effort  to  get  people  to  come  to  church  with  no 
proportionate  labor  on  the  uses  to  be  made  of 
their  coming.  The  great  evangelists  all  went 
to  men ;  they  did  not  try  to  get  men  to  come  to 
them.  They  did  not  exhaust  themselves  on 
the  mechanics  of  a  service  but  in  the  dynamics 
of  the  result.  Seeking  his  results  in  the  mov- 
ing of  men  to  live  by  the  principles  of  Christ 
and  the  power  of  Christ  in  all  the  functions  of 
life,  the  modern  evangelist  will  go  wherever 
men  are  gathered  in  these  functions — in  the 
labor  hall  and  the  political  meeting,  not  to  get 
men  in  touch  with  the  Church,  but  to  speak 
the  word  of  life;  in  the  banquet  hall  and  the 
club,  not  as  the  court  chaplain,  still  less  as  the 

[^37] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


court  jester,  but  as  the  prophet  of  the  living 
God.  When  the  word  of  Jehovah  is  a  fire  in 
the  bones  of  men,  it  w^ill  get  out,  it  will  not 
wait  for  the  crowd  to  gather,  it  will  care  little 
whether  the  crowd  is  there  or  not.  The  voice 
that  cries  in  the  wilderness,  sounding  far  out 
across  the  desert  wastes,  reaches  back  to  the 
crowd  behind  it  that  has  come  from  the  city, 
reaches  back  beyond  them  into  the  city  itself 
and  touches  and  molds  all  the  throbbing  life 
of  men. 

Evangelism  must  move  the  mass  to-day,  for 
Christianity  is  to  be  put  into  the  group  life, 
but  the  gathering  of  the  crowd  can  never  be 
counted  as  any  result  at  all;  it  is  simply  an 
opportunity.  The  evangelism  that  has  the 
independence  of  Jesus  for  the  crowd  will  de- 
velop the  results  that  followed  his  preaching. 
The  crowd  followed  Jesus,  and  he  sought  God 
in  the  lonely  places.  The  crowd  deserted 
him,  and  he  set  his  face  toward  Jerusalem  and 
death.     The  disciples  fled,   and  he  walked 

[138] 


WHAT  ABOUT  RESULTS? 

lonely  to  the  judgment  seat,  in  his  last  agony 
finding  only  a  thief  for  comradeship.  Thus 
he  lifted  the  world  up  to  himself  and  to  the 
Father. 

Those  who  preach  the  social  message  of 
Jesus,  together  with  those  who  are  working  it 
out  in  action,  may,  however,  properly  attempt 
and  expect  certain  practical  results  in  the 
amelioration  of  the  community  life.  The 
preaching  that  produces  a  conviction  of  social 
sin  will  succeed  in  eliminating  some  of  the 
unchristian  features  in  the  community  life. 
Organized  vice,  bad  housing,  grossly  unjust 
conditions  of  industry,  ought  to  be  immedi- 
ately removed.  The  preacher  who  does  not 
attack  these  evils,  who  does  not  insist  upon  the 
removal  of  the  stumbling-blocks  from  the 
paths  of  weak  children,  upon  making  secure 
the  bread  and  the  rest  of  the  worker,  will  be  no 
workman  approved  of  the  God  who  careth  for 
the  poor.  The  proclamation  of  the  social 
evangel   and  the   personal   influence   of   the 

[139] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


preacher  does  develop  some  constructive  re- 
sults in  welfare  work  in  the  community  and  in 
industry;  and  sometimes  directly  produces 
such  improvements  as  better  wages  and  profit- 
sharing,  and  helps  in  securing  wide-spread 
permanent  results  of  this  sort  through  legisla- 
tion. Also  such  preaching  diminishes  the 
antagonism  between  classes,  and  at  times  sug- 
gests and  promotes  measures  of  cooperation 
that  lessen  and  help  to  stop  the  war  and  waste 
of  industry.  While  such  results  may  be 
sought  and  found,  yet  even  of  these  the  evangel 
must  be  completely  independent.  It  must 
shape  its  effort  for  the  larger  goal  which  the 
social  imperative  of  the  gospel  demands.  It 
promotes  and  accepts  reforms  only  as  steps  to 
this  goal,  while  its  aim  is  the  complete  trans- 
formation of  the  social  order  until  it  shall 
embody  the  very  life  of  God. 

If  the  pulpit  becomes  engrossed  in  immedi- 
ate results,  in  the  securing  of  practical  meas- 
ures, its  vision  of  the  ultimate  goal  will  lose 
[140] 


WHAT  ABOUT  RESULTS? 

sharpness,  will  tend  to  fade  into  the  mists  of 
the  impossible  future.  It  may  even  permit 
men  to  be  satisfied  with  mere  half  measures, 
with  reforms  that  are  simply  profitable  to  the 
group  of  property  without  calling  their  souls 
to  the  last  hazard  in  the  sacrifice  that  will  es- 
tablish justice  whether  it  pays  or  not.  If  the 
pulpit  cares  too  much  for  the  credit  and  the 
joy  of  the  peacemaker  in  the  industrial  situa- 
tion, it  may  find  itself  in  the  easy  path  of  com- 
promise, crying  peace  when  there  is  no  peace, 
adjusting  differences  without  the  fundamental 
readjustment  of  the  causes  of  diflference.  And 
if  none  of  these  things  happens,  yet  to  look 
ever  for  immediate  results  may  lead  into  dis- 
couragement and  despair  when  these  visible, 
tangible  results  are  not  in  evidence.  Here, 
too,  the  preacher  of  the  gospel  of  Jesus  must 
be  as  his  Lord,  must  possess  with  him  some- 
thing of  the  patience  of  the  Infinite.  As  one 
of  our  prophets  has  reminded  us,  he  who 
works  for  social  progress  must  learn  to  think 

[141] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


with  the  geologist  and  with  God — in  eons,  not 
centuries. 

Because  a  socialized  evangelism  is  set  to 
realize  the  most  daring  dream  ever  dreamed 
of  men,  its  larger,  truer  results  are  indefinite 
and  intangible  and  lie  in  the  far-off  future. 
It  puts  the  leaven  of  new  life  into  the  social 
organism  to  work  its  fundamental  transforma- 
tion. It  is  a  process  of  growth,  a  sloughing 
off  of  old  imperfect  members,  a  development 
of  new  organs,  and  the  processes  of  interact- 
ing death  and  renewal  which  constitute  or- 
ganic growth  are  not  easily  perceived. 

The  value  of  such  work  is  hard  to  be  under- 
stood by  ecclesiastical  organizations  whose 
tendency  is  to  demand  immediate  results  in  the 
increase  of  adherents,  and  to  want  to  harvest 
the  crop  immediately  after  the  sowing.  These 
have  small  patience  with  the  slow  and  silent 
evangel  of  the  leaven  of  life,  whose  effective- 
ness can  never  be  estimated  by  the  standards 
of  men  possessed  by  the  demon  of  statistics. 

[142] 


WHAT  ABOUT  RESULTS? 

The  results  of  a  social  evangelism  are  not  easy 
to  catalog.  The  development  of  spiritual 
forces,  the  Christianizing  of  the  motor  powers 
of  the  community  are  not  things  to  be  meas- 
ured by  statistics.  With  what  instrument  is 
spiritual  power  to  be  gaged  and  with  what 
figures  will  you  express  the  growth  of  the  life 
of  the  spirit? 

Sometimes  the  social  leaven  may  be  seen 
at  work  and  its  results  perceived.  The  evi- 
dences that  the  community  life  yields  to  the 
evangel  are  now  and  again  apparent,  and 
changes  in  its  structure  may  occasionally  be 
noticed.  There  are  laws  upon  the  statute 
books  of  Illinois  that  represent  different  stand- 
ards of  value  and  a  changed  temper  of  life, 
much  more  fundamental  and  far-reaching 
than  these  expressions  of  it,  all  because  two 
women  some  twenty  years  ago  put  the  leaven 
of  their  lives,  in  the  Christ  spirit,  into  a 
neglected  community  on  the  West  side  of  Chi- 
cago. 

[143] 


SOCIAL  EVANGELISM 


Yet  the  results  of  the  social  evangel  in  word 
and  deed  pass  ever  beyond  the  power  of  per- 
ception. The  voice  and  the  life  that  puts  the 
gospel  of  the  Kingdom  into  a  community 
extends  the  ripples  of  its  influence  beyond 
vision,  multiplies  its  power  beyond  the  cal- 
culations of  the  mathematician,  awakens 
forces  that  other  generations  will  name  and 
organize.  When  a  preacher  gets  individual 
men  in  touch  with  God,  he  starts  results  in 
human  life  which  cannot  be  cataloged  in 
tables  of  church  statistics,  and  when  that  same 
preacher  gets  a  function  of  the  community 
life  in  touch  w^ith  God  he  is  doing  something 
which  may  not  be  written  into  reports.  He 
is  not  simply  a  community  builder  using  its 
materials  for  highest  ends,  he  is  an  imparter  of 
new  life,  developing  and  guiding  the  forces 
which  not  only  mold  the  form  but  change  the 
very  nature  of  the  social  organism.  He  lays 
hold  of  the  creative  will  and  puts  it  at  work 
in  the  community  life,  and  what  it  there  does 
[144] 


WHAT  ABOUT  RESULTS? 

is  presently  felt  in  the  whole  social  organism. 
The  preacher  and  doer  of  the  social  evangel 
— it  may  be  in  some  small  village  or  neglected 
section  of  a  great  city — is  in  reality  a  world 
builder,  A  creative  and  redemptive  fellow 
worker  with  God,  he  stands  where  time  began^ 
touching  the  primeval  force,  and  reaches  out 
to  where  time  ends  in  the  ultimate  accomplish- 
ment of  life.  Whatsoever  he  accomplishes 
makes  for  that  eternal  Kingdom  which  is  to 
be  the  outcome  of  all  our  shadowed  endeavors 
and  twilight  strivings,  the  justification  of  all 
our  hopes  and  dreams.  All  that  he  does  is  not 
now  to  be  known.  Its  full  value  can  appear 
only  when  the  work  of  men's  hands  is  seen 
without  the  veil  of  time  and  sense. 


1 145] 


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